Gasketed Plate Heat Exchanger Design

Gasketed Plate Heat Exchanger Design is a Windows application that facilitates a user-friendly interface for analyzing thermal data and making calculations of gasketed plate heat exchangers. It comes bundled with a unit converter and database for fouling factors, overall heat transfer coefficients, and others.

The only notable aspect about installation is that the tool cannot run if you don't have .NET Framework installed. Once setup is over, you can reach the main app window and start a new design by configuring some settings.

You can set the component name, temperature range and flow rate for the hot and cold side as well as edit physical properties such as the specific heat capacity, thermal conductivity, viscosity, density, fouling factor, and maximum pressure drop. The heat load can be either calculated or specified.

In the following step, you can preview the design and input a wide range of data, such as geometrical parameters (e.g. port diameter, plate thickness, channel spacing), plate manufacturer, type and material, gasket material, connections and frame type, assumed overall heat transfer coefficient, along with software or user correlations.

Based on all these properties, Gasketed Plate Heat Exchanger Design calculates the average temperatures of the hot and color side, heat load, log mean temperature difference, number of transfer units based on the maximum temperature difference, and the surface area based on the log mean temperature correction factor.

Additional calculations focus on the plate pitch (e.g. compressed plate pack length, channel spacing), distilled and raw water (e.g. mass flow per channel, velocity through port and channel). You can also get a summary of the proposed design, print it, save it in Excel format, or it as an image.

As far as program settings are concerned, it's possible to set the measurement unit to SI (metric) or US (imperial). You can also make conversions between many types of units such as area, density, energy, entropy and heat flux, check out the overall heat transfer coefficients, material thermal conductivity, manufacturer plates, and more.

The tool worked smoothly on Windows 10 in our tests. It remained light on system resources usage throughout its runtime and performed calculations swiftly.

All aspects considered, Gasketed Plate Heat Exchanger Design comes wrapped in a user-friendly interface and features practical options and a rich database for those interested in performing thermal analysis and calculations.