subject: Pump Up The Heat, Please! [print this page] Pump Up The Heat, Please! Pump Up The Heat, Please!
With the cold weather creeping up on us so quickly, our heaters are going to start working overtime. Whether it is in our homes, places of work or our automobiles, heat is something very crucial to our lives once winter rolls around. What gives us this heat though? How do we get it and how does it work? Take your car for instance a heat source, being a hot engine-cooling fluid like water, transfers the heat to the air flowing through the radiator. This is known as a heat exchanger. A heat exchanger is a device built for heat transfer from one object to another. These objects are often times separated by a wall-like structure. They are widely used in space heating, refrigeration, air conditioning, power plants, natural gas processing, and sewage treatment.
There are a few different types of heat exchangers parallel-flow heat exchangers, counter-flow heat exchangers and cross-flow heat exchangers. With parallel-flow, the two fluids enter the exchanger at the same end and travel parallel with each other to the other side. With counter-flow, both fluids enter the exchanger from opposite ends. This counter-flow method is the most efficient because it can transfer the most heat from the object it is getting it from. Lastly, with cross-flow, the fluids travel perpendicular to one another through the exchanger.
Heat exchangers are mainly designed to increase the surface area of the wall between the two fluids, while decreasing the flow of fluid through the exchanger itself. These heat exchangers consist of a variety of tubes. The first set of these tubes contains the fluid that either has to be heated or cooled. The second fluid moves over the tubes that are being heated or cooled so that it can either give or take the heat that's required. Heat exchangers are usually taken for granted because we don't tend to think about how the heat is getting to our cold body just that it's getting there. To learn more about heat exchangers, visit www.fluorotherm.com.
