We’ve already often talked about crossing of temperatures, a kind of thermal transfer we’ve spoke about especially for plate heat exchangers, but also related to shell and tube exchangers. In fact, when speaking about temperature crossing, the ideal kind of exchangers to employ are plate heat exchangers.

In this tiny video here, we can see a shell and plate exchanger designed for low flow rates and to achieve a crossing of temperatures and heat recovery. As you can see, the exchanger is very long, with tubes with a length of 6 meters. This length is required due to the fact that, having a low flow rate, we want to achieve a temperature crossing and obtain a heat recovery, which is a very hard task for a shell and tube exchanger.

In fact there was no valid alternative, due to a problem of fouling because the customer works with a very dirty fluid, rich in suspended particles. That’s why a shell and plate exchanger has been chosen with very long tubes, allowing a pipe cleaner to be inserted to clean the tubes internally. A plate heat exchanger would have required very intensive maintenance operations with close intervention times.

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