How to Boost the Efficiency of Heat Exchanger

Heat exchanger are commonly found in your daily life from your car radiator to the coils of your refrigerator. A heat exchanger is a device that heats one flowing substance from another flowing substance. A perfectly efficient heat exchanger will move 100 percent of the thermal energy from the first substance to the second substance and vice verse. The efficiency of heat exchanger is dependent on the construction material, total exchange surface, flow pattern and flow rate.

1. Remove any insulation between the two substances. Since changing the construction material of a heat exchangers is not practical, removing any insulation between the two substances will help with the transfer of energy. Paint is the most common insulation placed upon a heat exchanger. If the construction material can be selected, you should choose something with a good thermal conductivity and low heat capacity, like copper.

2. Increase the surface area in which the two substances touch. The simplest way is to extend the length of the heat exchanger tube. If you have a liquid-to-gas system, like in a radiator, flattening the tubes generates more surface area for the gas to be heated upon, increasing the efficiency.

3. Connect the input of the hot substance at the opposite end as the input of the cold substance. This allows the hot substance when it is hot to heat the cold substance when it is warm and the hot substance when it is warm to heat the cold substance when it is cold. This allows the cold substance to come as close as possible to reaching the temperature of the hot substance.

4. Slow the flow rate of the two substances through the heat exchanger. If the substances are flowing too quickly for their thermal conductivity, the hot substance will flow through the heat exchanger before it can transfer it's heat to the cold substance, and the cold substance will flow through the system before it can absorb all of the heat available.