Dave Butterworth as a self-confessed old timer, gave a presentation on his experiences of heat exchangers which were apparently well designed and clean but failed to achieve the design duty by a wide margin. One key to understanding this is to realise that, when trying to achieve high thermal effectiveness, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. He gave an analogy of climbing Everest being similar to designing an exchanger with high thermal effectiveness.
Single-phase exchangers present particular problems when going for the summit of high thermal effectiveness but boiling and condensation duties give additional problems. Dave described the phenomena which could occur in single-phase, boiling and condensation and illustrated this with a number of real examples of problem heat exchangers.
He also suggested ways in which the current heat-exchanger software could be adapted to iron out some of these problems at the design sage.
The presentation provoked a members of the audience to share their experiences with problem heat exchangers.
