Detailed Product Description

As its name implies, this type of heat exchanger consists of a shell (a large ) with a bundle of inside it. One fluid runs through the tubes, and another fluid flows over the tubes (through the shell) to transfer heat between the two fluids. The set of tubes is called a tube bundle, and may be composed by several types of tubes: plain, longitudinally finned, etc.

Two fluids, of different starting temperatures, flow through the heat exchanger. One flows through the tubes (the tube side) and the other flows outside the tubes but inside the shell (the shell side). Heat is transferred from one fluid to the other through the tube walls, either from tube side to shell side or vice versa. The fluids can be either or on either the shell or the tube side. In order to transfer heat efficiently, a large area should be used, leading to the use of many tubes. In this way, waste heat can be put to use. This is an efficient way to conserve energy.

Heat exchangers with only one (liquid or gas) on each side can be called one-phase or single-phase heat exchangers. Two-phase heat exchangers can be used to heat a liquid to boil it into a gas (vapor), sometimes called , or cool a vapor to condense it into a liquid (called ), with the phase change usually occurring on the shell side. Boilers in steam engine are typically large, usually cylindrically-shaped shell-and-tube heat exchangers. In large with steam-driven , shell-and-tube are used to condense the exhaust exiting the turbine into condensate which is recycled back to be turned into steam in the steam generator.