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Category Archive: Commercial Grade / HVAC

Tag Archive: Commercial Grade / HVAC

  1. Enerquip Helps Design a Fountain that Flows During Freezing Temperatures

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    Enerquip’s shell and tube heat exchanger solution keeps this fountain working well all year round.
    Enerquip’s shell and tube heat exchanger solution keeps this fountain working well all year round.

    Signature Fountains, a national fountain installation company, works to ensure each project they complete looks great, benefits its clients and functions well. Sometimes, that means overcoming obstacles that make pumping water difficult.

    Ascend Federal Credit Union came to Signature Fountains for help designing a fountain to place outside its corporate headquarters in Tullahoma, Tennessee. They wanted the fountain to flow as much as possible, even when temperatures drop.

    Tennessee has mild winters, with average January temperatures ranging from 36 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the University of Tennessee’s Institute of Agriculture. However, there are times when the mercury can dip below freezing. When that happens, outdoor fountains can’t function properly and can be at risk of damage due to ice.

    To solve this issue, Signature Fountains wanted to create a way to heat the water under certain circumstances. They turned to Enerquip’s heat exchanger experts for help. They had a few requirements:

    • The heat exchanger needed to be very compact, able to fit inside a small utility pit designed for the fountain’s equipment and controls.
    • It needed to source hot water from a nearby location.
    • It needed to activate based on environmental conditions.

    Signature Fountains and the credit union weren’t sure how much heat was lost through the fountain. Without this information, the project was more complex. Further, both companies were working with tight deadlines, and the installation needed to be completed quickly.

    Enerquip worked with Signature Fountains to design the perfect heat exchanger and control for the fountain. When the temperature dropped below 45 degrees, it would turn on. A pump sourced hot water from the credit union’s nearby office building to circulate through the exchanger. It has a multi-pass design, which efficiently directs the hot water to flow through the exchanger several times.

    “The design worked beyond our best expectations,” wrote Gary Boeyer of Signature Fountains.

    Both Signature Fountains and Ascend Federal Credit Union were impressed with the design and how well the fountain runs. Additionally, they were pleased that Enerquip made an effort to help them stay on schedule. By working quickly yet intelligently, Enerquip created a long-lasting solution for the credit union.

    “Recently, Tullahoma experienced cold overnight temperatures,” Boeyer noted. “The system turned on, the heat exchanger very effectively heated the water and the fountain was kept in operation.”

  2. Enerquip Introduces New Product Line – Compact Heat Exchangers

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    MEDFORD – Enerquip, a Wisconsin company that specializes in a wide variety of shell and tube heat exchangers, recently added a new line of compact heat exchangers to meet the growing demand from customers with low flow-rate applications.

    Enerquip has been one of the leading providers of heating and cooling equipment for production plants and the OEM’s and system integrators that support them. The company crafts stainless steel and high alloy shell and tube heat exchangers of the highest quality, with delivery lead-times that are half of the industry standard. The size of Enerquip heat exchangers can range from the size of a loaf of bread up to 10 tons.

    “Until now, we haven’t had an efficient solution for product flow rates from 1 to 10 gallons per minute,” explained Ron Herman, Director of Sales & Marketing. “These scaled down versions of our exchangers utilize smaller tubes that increase tube side velocities and turbulence, while avoiding problems with bypass seen in larger exchangers when they are used at low flow rates.”

    Available in both U-tube and straight tube designs, these space-saving exchangers are easy to clean, are high quality and built to last. Enerquip’s compact exchangers are also ASME code stamped, to provide customers with peace of mind that their product and their people will be safe during production.

    This new product line is perfect for small batch processes, point-of-use streams, or R&D or pilot scale applications where a smaller compact exchanger would be an advantage.

  3. Shell and tube heat exchangers used for waste heat recovery

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    Waste heat recovery has been a topic of concern for large-scale industrial companies for several decades. Not only does recovering waste heat make an operation more environmentally friendly, but it also helps to cut costs. Additionally, it can reduce the amount of resources needed to power a facility.

    Many industries and facilities have implemented different methods of waste heat recovery. One popular choice is using a shell and tube heat exchanger. According to the Energy Efficiency Guide for Industry in Asia, these exchangers are best suited for recovery methods dealing with warming liquids with heat recovered from:

    1. Condensates from process steam, distillation processes or refrigeration, or air-conditioning systems
    2. Coolants from engines, lubricants, bearings, air compressors, furnace doors, pipes or grates
    3. Flue gas streams and exhaust streams from furnaces, dryers and exhaust stacks

    The waste heat usually flows shell side, while the liquid is positioned tube side. This is because the higher-pressure liquid or vapor should be in the tube, because the shell is the weaker container. Utility fluids and products being heated can also be kept cleaner on the tube side of a heat exchanger. Waste heat typically produces condensation. Allowing condensates to form on the inside of the tube will typically cause flow irregularities and could lead to problems with the exchanger.

    Vegetable oil processing plant

    One example of a shell and tube heat exchanger put into practice for recovering waste heat is outlined in Energy Mines and Resources Canada’s Energy Management Series for Industry Commerce and Institutions. The paper explained a vegetable oil processing plant hoped to reduce its use of a steam heater in the refining process. The semi-processed oil needs to be heated from 30 degrees Celsius to 80 degrees before heading to the final stage of processing and then storage.

    “A shell and tube heat exchanger for waste heat recovery saved a processing plant $29,570 a year.”

    When the oil is transferred to storage, some heat is expelled that the company wanted to recover. This heat would then be used to warm the oil before going to the steam heater, reducing the amount of energy needed to bring the oil to its optimum temperature. By sending the oil through the heat exchanger prior to going into the steam heater, the oil can be heated to 70 degrees Celsius, requiring the steam heater to only raise the temperature by 10 degrees instead of 50.

    By implementing this practice, it was predicted the processing plant could save $29,570 annually. Taking into consideration the cost of the exchanger and its installation, it would take slightly more than half a year to see financial benefits.

    Diesel engines

    Research done by Saiful Bari, a senior lecturer, and Shekh N. Hossain, a research student at the Barbara Hardy Institute, a division of the School of Engineering at the University of South Australia, showed shell and tube heat exchangers could also provide beneficial heat recovery methods for diesel engines.

    Bari and Hossain explained the exhaust from diesel engines contains 38 percent usable energy. Heat exchangers were fitted to connect to the engine’s exhaust and arranged in parallel and series configurations. The two exchangers had different purposes. One, called the super heater, was used to superheat steam coming from the exhaust, which normally expands in the truck’s turbines. The second, named the vapor generator, was used to generate vapor from a liquid put into the exchanger.

    The researchers found in initial testing that 16 percent of additional power was recovered. Knowing that the heat exchangers used were not built specifically for this application, they decided to customize them to more efficiently recover the heat. After optimization, 23.7 percent additional power was generated. They also found that maximum heat recovery could be achieved with both the series and parallel arrangements when the engine’s pressure is higher, specifically at 30-bar working pressure. With this pressure, up to 9.85 kilowatts of energy could be retrieved. With lower-pressure engines, the parallel configuration is more efficient than the series configuration because it produced a higher mass of steam.

    Bari and Hossain attributed the success of their research partially to the fact that they customized the design of the heat exchangers to the particular engine used. They noted that, by using these shell and tube heat exchangers for heat recovering, the efficiency of the engine rose from 30 percent to 41 percent.

    Both of these examples show that waste heat recovery can be used to save money and resources, as well as make processes more energy efficient. Many different industries can benefit from using shell and tube heat exchangers in this way.