Project Synopsis
Project Summary
CHEMICAL FACILITY REPLACEMENT HEAT EXCHANGER PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
The client is a manufacturer of equipment who was asked to refurbish a heat exchanger in service at a chemical manufacturing facility. The chemical manufacturer wanted to replace the existing carbon steel tubes with stainless steel tubes and wanted to know the performance change associated with this modification. Process Engineering Associates, LLC (PROCESS) was contracted to evaluate the changes in performance that would be caused by this modification.
Project tasks included the following:
- Rate both the existing carbon steel and modified stainless steel tube heat exchangers using PROCESS‘ licensed commercial heat exchanger evaluation/design software, CCTHERM
- Produced a report detailing the performance difference between the carbon steel and stainless steel tubes.
PROCESS calculated that the exchanger performance would be reduced by approximately 10% if the carbon steel tubes were replaced by stainless tubes of the same thickness. In order to help mitigate the performance loss, PROCESS recommended using one gauge thinner tubes for the replacement, which were structurally suitable for the application and which would result in a performance loss of only about 5%.
Industry Type
- Industrial Equipment Manufacturing
Utilized Skills
- Heat exchanger evaluation