Design, Fabrication and Performance Evaluation of a Shell and Tube Heat Exchanger for Practical Application

A heat exchanger is a device used to transfer thermal energy between two or more fluids, at different temperatures in thermal contact. This paper focuses on a shell-and-tubes heat exchanger that involves two fluids (hot water and cold water) in contact with each other while the cold water flows through the tubes and hot water through the shell. Heat exchangers have special and practical applications in the feed water cooler in the process industries, power plants, chemical plants, refineries, process applications as well as refrigeration and air conditioning industry. The design calculations were carried out to determine the specifications of essential parameters for the development of the heat exchanger, data generated from the theoretical formulae were used to fabricate the heat exchanger using some locally available and durable materials, and the performance of the system was evaluated. Some of the parameters evaluated include heat duty, capacity ratio, effectiveness, overall heat transfer coefficient, and fouling factor. The heat exchanger was tested under various flow conditions and the results obtained were as follows; cold water inlet temperatures of (26, 26, 26, 27and 27) ºC increased to (59, 44, 39, 47 and 35) ºC after (10, 7½, 6½ 8, and 6) minutes and the hot water temperatures decreased from (100, 80, 75, 87 and 73) ºC to (73, 59, 55, 62 and 50) ºC, respectively. The design data and test data were compared in terms of the heat duty, capacity ratio, effectiveness, overall heat transfer coefficient, and fouling factor, the deviation is found to be 22.87%, 13.99%, 8.98%, 43.30%, and 43.30% respectively. The results obtained proved that the heat exchanger was effective, reliable and provides a good technical approach to evaluate the thermal performance of the heat exchanger and useful in conducting heat and mass transfer practical in thermodynamics laboratory.