Development of a computer program for designing gasketed plate heat exchangers for various working conditions and verification of the computer program with experimental data

The main aim of this study is to develop a computer program that selects the most applicable plate heat exchanger under various working conditions and constraints and to implement the developed correlations, which are unique to each chevron type plate?s design geometry (Chevron angles, parameters of plate corrugations etc.), based on experimental results. An experimental setup was designed and built and a series of experiments were completed with wide ranges of plate numbers, flow rates, inlet and outlet temperatures, and using water as the working fluid on both flow sides. The newly developed correlations of different Chevron plates are implemented to the computer program. Using these correlations with the general heat transfer and pressure drop equations and LMTD method, the heat transfer and pressure drop analysis for each plate type is made. The computer program, which is developed using Visual Basic, has been verified by the experimental findings. For given heat transfer load, inlet and outlet temperature, and maximum allowed pressure drop, the most applicable plate heat exchangers are presented to the selection of the user, based on the correlations obtained from the experimental findings. Limited amount of correlations, which are found as the results of similar studies in the literature, are compared to the correlations of heat transfer and pressure drop of this study.