SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT OF EFFICIENT AND RELIABLE OF ALUMINIUM PLATE-FIN HEAT EXCHANGERS BY THEIR CONSTRUCTION

Abstract

Aluminium brazed plate fin heat exchangers have wide application in the cryogenics industry, in particular in gas processing applications such as LNG plants. The complex technology of brazed aluminium plate-fin heat exchangers offers a high-level heat transfer capacity and a large range of allowable pressures, but requires highly skilled design in return. At optimal design leads to some difficulties due to the fact that any hydraulic or thermal perturbation on a stream is directly propagated to the others through the aluminium core matrix, and could also directly impact the mechanical integrity of the exchanger. This is particularly applicable to off-design and non-steady state conditions. Becourse of this the attention should pay on the implementation of technical resources in order to provide accurate expertise for the operation of brazed aluminium plate-fin heat exchangers, including thermo-hydraulic analysis and mechanical stresses studies. For this in-house computational tools are used to highlight the physical phenomena which are inherent to the behavior of brazed aluminium plate-fin heat exchangers. Therefore, the reliability of brazed aluminium plate-fin heat exchangers is directly based on such calculations in order to define and continuously improve the standard design rules.