Case Study: Advanced software tools to capture heat exchange
Thermal Process Engineer, Nathan Hill, has produced a very interesting case study on "Advanced Software Tools to Capture Heat Exchanger Cost Savings", which was given at the Heat Exchange Engineering Europe Conference in Prague, Czech Republic, which provides a detailed case study to illustrate the use of commercially-available software tools which allow the benefits of heat transfer enhancement technology to be realised in new plant design.
CALGAVIN®'s hiTRAN®.SP plug-in tools provide the designer with rigorous thermal/hydraulic models for enhanced heat exchanger sizing. Exchanger Optimizer software from HTRI generates detailed capital and operating cost data for life-cycle cost comparison purposes. Used together, these software tools allow heat exchanger designers to reliably quantify cost saving opportunities while retaining full control of the design process.
Although heat transfer enhancement technologies are well-established in the process industry, many opportunities to reduce heat exchanger capital and operating costs are not being exploited. Significant savings may be available but may only be investigated if they can be reliably quantified early enough in the plant design cycle.
In order to capture the available savings, the heat exchanger designer requires software tools which allow reliable models of enhanced heat exchangers to be constructed in the early stages of equipment design. Furthermore, rigorous cost comparison tools are required to quantify the life-cycle cost benefits arising from the use of enhancement techniques.
In this paper, we will focus on the use of the HTRI Xchanger Suite® software package to assist in the thermal design of a heat exchanger. Then, we will use HTRI’s Exchanger Optimizer package to estimate the purchase, installation and operating costs of the resulting heat exchanger designs and evaluate the cost benefits between the enhanced and non-enhanced designs.
For the full details please download the linked PDF