Are you tired of designing Air Cooled Heat Exchangers for your application? Air Cooled Heat Exchangers are a highly standard product. Can you please simply give me how many number of bays I need for my application in one hour, instead of spending several days with various designs and plots?
If you are the guy who asked the questions above, you are in the right place. You don't even need one hour; all you need is just one minute.
Aspentech Exchanger Design and Rating (EDR) programs are widely used in the oil and gas industry and the programs are extremely powerful. However, being powerful also means being complicated. A typical process engineer does not want to dive into the details of air cooled condensers and they just want to know how many number of bays.
An Excel program was developed by Guofu Chen to solve this challenge. It has a nice interface in Excel and it is very easy to input data. The only information needed is the process information, which every process engineer should have. Simply input process flow, pressure, temperature and ambient conditions and you are ready to hit the "RUN" button. As you might be able to see, the Excel program send the input information to the EDR program; EDR will start to calculate and eventually the result is sent back to Excel.
In this example, 10 bays is used. But as a matter of fact, you can also try 11, 12, 13 and 14 bays and choose the most optimum number of bays.
As you can see, with 12 bays, the total operation cost and capital cost is the lowest, thus 12 bays should be chosen.
With this tool, do you think you can size an Air Cooled Heat Exchanger in one minute? You surely can.
Thanks for watching this video, it is brought to you by Guofu Chen. More interesting topics can be found at showcase.guofuchen.com
