Summary

We have come to the end of this course on How Heat Exchangers Work. Forced convection is a critical phenomenon in many engineering applications involving heating and cooling. Here, liquids and/or gases are forced to flow through pipes and ducts to accomplish the desired heat transfer process. In these cases, the friction factor and convection coefficient play a vital role as they are directly related to the associated pressure drop and heat transfer rate, respectively. These quantities are then used to estimate the pumping power requirement and the required tube length.

In this course, we started our discussion with the analysis of velocity and thermal fields in internal flows and talked about the concepts of mean velocity and mean temperature. We then looked at the general heat transfer analysis in internal flows and discussed various laminar and turbulent pipe flow correlations. Heat transfer enhancement designs such as coil-spring wire, twisted tapes, etc., were introduced and their effect on overall heat transfer was explained. We also looked at heat exchangers and discussed their different types. Lastly, we put ourselves in the shoes of a mechanical engineer performing heat exchanger analysis and conducted design and performance calculations for heat exchangers.