Aspects of Heat Transfer in the Process Industry: Design, Analysis and Troubleshooting of Heat Exchangers

Heat transfer is a key unit operation in the chemical and process industry, encompassing a large variety of equipment (heat exchangers, reboilers) and processes (convection, radiation, phase change). Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation is used extensively in the design, analysis and troubleshooting of such equipment and processes.

This webinar will provide an overview of the key technologies in Simcenter that enable the engineering design, analysis, and design exploration of heat transfer equipment.

The webinar will feature a guest presentation from Porter-McGuffie Inc., demonstrating the application of Simcenter STAR-CCM+ to model the transient thermally-induced stresses that occur when a process gas heater trips during the start-up of a shell-and-tube heat exchanger. A trip during start-up results in a rapid change in the process-side stream temperature from 580 °F to 200 °F before the heater is brought back on-line—a situation known to have caused failures in similar exchangers, prompting the use of Simcenter STAR-CCM+ to evaluate this condition for a new exchanger design. The presentation will cover both the setup and analysis of the coupled thermo-mechanical model, and how the results were used to evaluate the exchanger using ASME Code.