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Design
Spirit production case study : The complete study carried out by GRETh led to identifying operating margins on the specifications and an optimized heat exchanger design .
mechanical design and with the standard manufacturing possibilities to meet the standards and mechanical calculation codes in force ;
5 . Real operating conditions simulation and variation : once the heat exchanger has been sized at its design point , the real operating conditions are often far from the said design point and it is therefore often necessary to evaluate the real heat exchanger performance for the other operating conditions . This allows us to know the variation range of the main operating criteria which will be used for example for the system regulation ;
6 . Manufacturing : with respect to the specifications from the thermal-hydraulic and mechanical design ;
7 . Integration to the complete system including the recommendations of the expert to ensure , for example , a good fluid distribution in the heat exchanger and proper arrangement , if necessary , of the metrological devices which will be used for the process control and the performance tests ;
8 . Performance and conformity tests , in particular with acceptance tests in real operating conditions previously simulated .
These phases and an in-depth analysis by the experts will greatly determine a project ' s success . For example , the choice of an ‘ A ’ heat exchanger technology , which is initially much more expensive than a ‘ B ’ heat exchanger technology , may turn out to be the best solution considering the process compactness requirement and the great maintenance and cleaning difficulty , leading to a prohibitive operating cost in the ‘ B ’ case , which initially seemed to be the least expensive . In order to clearly understand the importance of the statements and steps defined in the previous paragraphs , we provide in the following a short experience feedback on a simple case which illustrates the consequences of the above mentioned steps not being respected .
Case study A customer , a spirit producer , had a new production plant built and was looking to increase the production rate in order to meet the growing demand of his consumers . Within the framework of the alembics realisation , which remains a key point of the production process , one of the key components is the condenser of the system which allows to recover the alcoholic vapors condensate . The initial project purpose was to double the condensate capacity due to the overall process production increase . The plant , built many years ago , was working perfectly and the customer asked
22 Heat Exchanger World April 2023 www . heat-exchanger-world . com