Helical Coil Heat Exchanger Design

What is Helical Coil Heat Exchanger

Helical Coil Heat Exchangers(HCHE) are the important engineering equipments used for transferring heat from one fluid to another. Heat exchangers are widely used in various kinds of application such as power plants, nuclear reactors, refrigeration and air-conditioning systems, heat recovery systems, petrochemical, mechanical, biomedical industries. Helical coil heat exchangers are gaining wide importance now-a-days because it can give high heat transfer coefficient in small footprint of surface area.

What is The Advantage of Helical Coil Heat Exchanger

Helical coil heat exchanger have many benefit that make it a good choices:

1. Highly efficient use of space, especially when it’s limited and not enough straight pipe can be laid.

2.Under conditions of low flowrates (or laminar flow), such that that the typical shell-and-tube exchangers have low heat-transfer coefficients and becoming uneconomical.

3.When there is low pressure in one of the fluids, usually from accumulated pressure drops in oth

er process equipment.

4.When one of the fluids has components in multiple phases (solids, liquids, and gases), which tends to create mechanical problems during operations, such as plugging of small-diameter tubes. Cleaning of helical coils for these multiple-phase fluids can prove to be more difficult than its shell and tube counterpart; however the helical coil unit would require cleaning less often.

What need to consider when design Helical Coil Heat Exchaner

1.Materials

When designing the helical coil heat exchanger, the first thing you need to consider is what material you should use. Copper tube and Stainless Steel tube are two most common choices. Copper tube have relatively higher heat exchange rate, and is much easier to be fabricated to the HCHE, because copper tube is more soft. Stainless steel tube doesn't react with water, which make it last longer, especially when one of the heat transferring fluid is water.