3 replies to this topic

[process equipment]

dear all and art,

i have to design some shell and tube heat exchangers of gas/gas, liquid/gas and liqiud/liquid in HTRI. Some of them are condenser and superheaters. I dont have experinece in HTRI and this is all new for me.I have theoretical (university) design level but not with HTRI.

What are the basic steps and procedure to start with my design?

How shoul I start.

Thanks

[Art Montemayor]

I've used HTRI for liquid-liquid, condensing, and gas-gas heat exchanger design during 1989-1995 and it was not very user-friendly then - but very thorough and detailed in all aspects of process design. It was backed up by extensive research and development papers and reports with constant up-dating of the information. Every design I put out showed its merit and performed flawlessly. It was a little hard work learning how to input the information and how to interpret the output, but once I did a couple of designs it became second nature. The HTRI organization is a very serious one and always gave backup information, help, and assistance in the application of the program. I'm sure you will have that help feature available to you as well.

Today, I no longer work with HTRI - at least not for the time being. This could change and I foresee that if that were the case, I might have to go through a period - like a week - getting familiar and used to the new, windows, format and input system. I've seen some results with today's version and it works just as before, except that I'm told it is much more friendlier and easier to get accustomed to. The database certainly has grown much bigger than 15 years ago. My thoughts are that with your background, you should have no trouble getting familiar and used to working with HTRI. It is a powerful tool, but in true perspective it is nothing more than another computer program - it is very stupid. Therefore, you have to be careful and accurate in your data input. To the extent that you understand the full principles of process heat transfer you will do fine in the initial data input. However, depending on how much hands-on or mechanical design exposure you have with respect to exchanger fabrication, you may have to spend some time with an experienced user to ensure that you can interpret the results successfully. This is not a hard exercise and, I think, it is actually a fun experience in learning and mastering the mechanical features of how an exchanger is fabricated.

Somehow I envy you because I think you are going to go through a very enjoyable experience that will enable you to put out some very good, accurate design products. Good Luck.

[jprocess]

Dear Art,
Could you please explain about the design and optimisation logic that HTRI use in design calculation?
Thanks in advavance.

[process equipment]

Dear art,

Thank you very much for your useful feedback (gives me quite confidence to do the design!) Well indeed it is fun to use HTRI and the help fuction is very user friendly. After some excersices i tried to manage to design a STHE. The thing is in the design mode you have to specify a reasonable HEX based on the available process data sheet. HTRI will optimize a design by selecting a small HEX ( or with small area).

So Art is this basically a trial and error design based on my configuration input and subsequently rating the optimized HEX. And because there are so many information in the results its quite confusing how to interpret these and what are the key issues. Process engineers with about 20-30 years experience in this field can tell you more about the outcome results unlike fresh graduated engineers like me. Furthermore I can not find any correlation indicating the cost and the selected equipment ?

Art do you think there are other programs more convenient than HTRI like HTFS and ASPEN products ?

Thanks in advance