What are Heat Exchangers?

Heat exchangers are a device used to transfer thermal energy from one fluid to another, with no direct contact between or mixing of these fluids.

What Does Heat Recovery Involve?

They make a distinction between heat recovery at high temperatures. Specifically from combustion products (stack gases) and recovery at low temperature, from cooling water cooling circuits, wastewater, or process effluents, hot air from drying or compression, or poorly insulated surfaces.

How Do You Choose a Heat Exchanger?

The choice of heat exchangers is determined by many criteria: the fluids involved (liquid/liquid, liquid/vapor, gas/gas) and their nature (clean, fouling, viscous, corrosive), the temperature, temperature difference, thermal exchange coefficient), the pressures involved (maximum service pressure, design pressure), the required ease of maintenance, and the level of maintenance.

What is a Condenser and Can A Heat Exchanger Take its Place?

A condenser is a device that allows moving fluid from the gaseous state to the liquid state by condensing.  Heat exchangers are suitable for this function and allow, by cooling the gas with another colder fluid to condense it. Condensation releases the latent heat, and the power of a possible desuperheating uses as energy to heat another colder fluid.  According to the thermal program, the power can be increased by a sub-cooling of condensate in a suitable design.  The gaseous fluid may be the main fluid to be treated or can be the fluid that brings the heat.

If the gaseous fluid is pure and the heat exchanger design is capable, all the gas will condense and transform into a liquid.  The resulting condensates are in thermodynamic equilibrium with the fast phase.  If the gaseous fluid is a mix or includes non-condensable gases, the condensed quantity will depend, among other things, of the mass fraction and the outlet temperature of the heat exchanger.

How Do Fluids Pass-Through an Exchanger?

The basic objective in the case of particle-laden, fouling, or viscous fluid is to maintain speed and rheology’s compatible with a good thermal exchange.  Rheology is the science of fluid flows in a given environment.  Another name for it is fluid mechanics.  A flow regime may be laminar, transient, or turbulent and its characterization is by a dimensionless Reynolds number.  Additionally, the heat exchanger will need to be made with different flow widths between the process fluid and the heating or cooling fluid.

Industries that Use Heat Exchangers

There are several industries that significantly benefit from a heat exchanger.  These include:

• Biofuels
• Breweries
• Dairy Farms
• Landfills
• Municipal Waste Water Treatment Plants

Where to Get a Customized Heat Exchanger

Komax Systems has created a unique design the Klean-Wall Heat Exchanger.  They can utilize it for mixing and heating municipal sludge, FOG, and manure for aerobic/anaerobic digestion purposes. They can also use the sludge to sludge heat exchanger for reclaiming heat.  From hot outgoing digested sludge to heat the cold incoming sludge.  The Komax heat exchanger enhances production and also helps in the production of Class A biosolids.  Because of the heat transfer improvement Komax shell and tube heat exchangers can be 50% smaller.  In contrast to a standard heat exchanger for the same heating application.

For any and all heat exchanger applications and needs, Komax can help create a solution with their state-of-the-art-technology and design.  Contact them specifically with questions on how to make your plant more efficient and profitable.