Plate heat exchangers can be employed for an interesting and particular field, which is the energy recovery. And in particular, energy recovery within the textile sector, using a special kind of plate heat exchangers called free flow exchangers.

These are special plate heat exchangers with very large passage channels and without contact points among the plates, and that’s the reason why they are called free flow.

In fact, as you can see in the pictures in the video below, the channel is very large and with no contact points between the plates. This involves clearly a negative effect in terms of thermal transfer efficiency, because the thermal transfer coefficients are lowered by having these large passage channels. But otherwise these exchangers offer great advantages when working with dirty fluids or containing solid suspended particles.

This is the typical case with cooling or for energy recovery from fluids coming from the industrial process in sectors such as paper mill or textile. An interesting application of these plate heat exchangers is in the textile production, where it’s possible to recover energy from the hot water coming from the dyeing tanks for fabrics dyeing, aimed at the pre-heating of the water that is going to be used to fill the tanks. In fact, it’s possible to reuse the thermal energy contained in the waste hot water coming from the dyeing process by letting it into the free flow exchanger, using it to heat the water that will be used for the new dyeing baths.

This really is a heavy duty application where a traditional plate heat exchanger couldn’t be employed. Instead, this application can be achieved with heat exchangers having a lower transfer efficiency but offering easy maintenance and that get not clogged. Free Flow plate heat exchangers are employed in substitution of those kind of exchangers that at this point become obsolete, with in fact a low thermal transfer efficiency.