Increase in Performance Efficiency of a Heat Exchanger Through Construction Modification

The aim of the research is to increase performance efficiency of a heat exchanger through construction modification.This was done by adding fins to the regular or existing heat exchanger and performance efficiency analysis carried out on the regular and modified heat exchanger to see which performed better.The results shows that the overall heat transfer for a modified heat exchanger is way more than the regular heat exchanger about 1200kw to 950kw for same input data.Conclusively, the rate of heat transfer varies with variation of the air inlet temperature for different water mass flow rates.Measurements and calculations reveal that the heat transfer rate increases as temperature and mass flow rate also increase.The result also confirms that the rate of heat flow increases with an increase in inlet temperature.Also, higher inlet temperature rate results in a greater heat transfer rate the fact that the greater flow rate causes a higher convective heat transfer coefficient of the waterside, the greater flow rate results in a higher heat transfer rate.Conversely, for a corresponding LMTD, it is observed that the LMTD of the air-added heat exchanger component is higher than that of the normal heat exchanger.One can easily say the higher the inlet temperature the higher the LMTD.The LMTD of the air-added heat exchanger ranges from 48.19 to 175oC while the normal heat exchanger LMTD ranges from 18.9 to 32oC.