Tuesday, October 21, 2008

A Mistake in Kern's Heat Transfer

Chemical engineers must be familiar with this set of equations, for designing a shell & tube heat exchanger.
The third equation for FT then plotted in some figures, corresponded to type of shell & tube exchanger flow. for example in the figure below. This set can be found in any reference that talk about shell & tube heat exchanger, and I think all of that refer to the main source, Kern's "Heat Transfer".

Let's check these cases out...

< case 1 >A stream 90 °C is going to be cooled to 70 °C using cold stream 30 °C, which its temperature will rise to 50 °C. We'll find, the value of R will be 1. Use this value in the equation for FT & LMTD. The value will be indefinite. So we cannot calculate the first equation.
< MyOpinion >The temperature differences are equal in both sides (T1-t2 = T2-t1), thus we can assume that the weighted/average temperature difference in this system is the same of those temperature differences, so we could use one of those. We can replace the FT.LMTD in the first equation with TD, which TD=T1-t2=T2-t1. We can see the similar condition in the system which use latent heat in both streams.

< case 2 >A stream 90 °C is going to be cooled to 60 °C using cold stream 30 °C, which its temperature will rise to 70 °C. In this system, we can calculate the value of LMTD, but not for the FT (it will be indefinite), so we cannot calculate the first equation for Q.
< MyOpinion >Examine the system, we will find that there will be cross temperature difference there. So, we cannot apply the combination of parallel-countercurrent (1-2, 1-4, 1-6, 1-8) to this system. We must use the fully countercurrent (with 1-1 exchanger) to this system, and replace the FT.LMTD with LMTD only, in the first equation.

Those are my opinions. I hope there will be other opinions, or comments. I'm affraid, perhaps i missunderstood the problem, then please send comment, or tell me the truth....thanks :)

2 comments:

Chemical Files said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Chemical Files said...

Nice post. It is what Kern has no mentioned in his book.
I totally agree with your first case and your opinion. However, the second case is not possible according to my knowledge. Since the outlet temperature of cold fluid (70deg) can never exceed inlet temperature of hot fluid (60deg.). If you ponder the case, hot fluid will again start gaining heat once the cold fluid has passed 60 deg. temperature and the desired hot outlet temperature will not be achieved.