Designing and Fabrication of laboratory scale shell and tube heat exchanger

Date : May 2015 - Nov 2015

The objective of this research thesis is to study how to design and construct one pass shell and tube heat exchanger with co-current and counter current flow arrangement on the laboratory scale so we are completely concerned with the market know how, designing, calculations, fabrication and practical performance of the equipment. Assumption feasibility of some necessary parameters and their correspondingly finding out the others to finalize the specifications of the equipment we are going to fabricate e.g. for hot stream, flow rate 0.102kg/s and the temperature difference 30oC is decided such that hot flow enter at 70oC and out at 40oC, to calculate the rate of heat transfer 'Q' by Q=m C p ΔT which is used to calculate surface area required. On the other hand cold water enters at 20oC and out at 40oC. A no. of baffles with 45% cut and 0.152m baffle spacing are used to increase the effectiveness of heat exchanger. Pitch of tubes is selected as square so as to compensate the pressure drop. Calculations of log mean temperature difference, energy balance; pressure drops findings and overall heat transfer coefficients. Finding out efficiency of the equipment with maximum heat transfer rate and less pressure drops are the primary function of this study. After fabrication of equipment, successfully implementation and observe the relationships between the rate heat transfer and temperature, effect of flow rate on heat transfer, pressure drops, and on the value of overall heat transfer coefficient. At the end, the observations of theoretical literature and practical performance are compared to notice out the errors present in the equipment and decisions of future work.