Heat Exchangers for Heat Transfer Lab

Matt Goetz

 

Summary:

The goal of this project was to provide the heat transfer class taught by Dr. Misovich of the Hope College Engineering department with lab equipment consisting of two separate heat exchangers. Two heat exchangers had been purchased and needed to be set up for lab experiments. All of the equipment to support the experiments and measurements needed to be fabricated or purchased from suppliers for this project to be successful. The exchangers needed to be mounted to an existing frame that was created for a fluid flow experiment by Eric Jongkryg and the current equipment needed to be modified to be able to run these two exchangers either in parallel, series or individually off of the same pump flow.

First, the existing frame was very unstable. The existing frame needed to be modified to support the new equipment being mounted to it. Brackets were added to both ends and in the middle of the frame to make the frame more sturdy and able to withstand the extra weight of the heat exchangers. Also, the exchangers needed to be attached securely to the frame so that when water was run through them they would not fall off and damage the frame or the exchangers. Another requirement was that the temperature of the incoming and exiting streams for both the shell and tube sides needed to be measured. This requires measuring the temperature of eight separate streams. Existing thermocouple wells could have been purchased from suppliers, but they would be out of the price range for this project so new, cheaper models needed to be designed to fit the equipment that was being used. These involved an extruded pipe that was slightly larger than that of the thermocouple wires that were welded at the end to seal them from the flowing fluid that were placed into the moving fluid and sealed with glue holding them in position. The exchangers were securely mounted and the piping was run from the previous equipment and water was run from the sink to create the two flow streams.