Software ProSec

Simulation of brazed plate fin heat exchangers
ProSec is a software dedicated to the simulation of multi-fluids plate fin heat exchangers, and in particular brazed aluminium exchangers. It is capable of modelling the full complexity of this type of equipment.

This heat exchanger technology, derived from the aeronautic industry, allows a large exchange surface with respect to volume and enables to reach small temperature pinch while ensuring simultaneous heat exchanges between several fluids. Thanks to its small size, this equipment was initially used in air separation and oxygen production applications. Today, it is operated in a wide variety of gas purification or liquefaction processes, including air constituents, natural gas or other hydrocarbons. They are used in single phase (liquid or vapour) but also in double phase (condensation and / or evaporation).
A brazed plate-fin heat exchanger consists of stacked corrugated sheets (fins) of various geometries, separated from each other by flat plates and sealed along the edge with bars. Fluids circulate in the adjacent flows that are created. According to the width, length of the sheets, the type of fin (straight, perforated, serrated, etc.), the number of stacked sheet, the fluid fitting sequence between flows, etc. numerous designs are feasible. The thermal engineer can benefit from this flexibility to design an exchanger that will satisfy the targeted heat transfers while respecting pressure drop constraints.

ProSec was designed to help him in this task, allowing him to easily check the impact of a design change on the temperature or the pressure of the cold box outflows. ProSec is the result of many years of research conducted with the Laboratoire de Génie Chimique (LGC) (http://lgc.inp-toulouse.fr) and Nordon Cryogenie (http://www.nordon-cryogenie.com), a leading manufacturer of this type of exchanger. This collaborative development has allowed rigorous validation of the correlations used for the calculation of exchange coefficient or of pressure drops and, most of all, has enable the representation of the full complexity of this type of equipment.

Other products are available for the simulation of this type of exchanger but they find their limits at three levels:
- They assume that the wall temperature is constant (this assumption is held in the ProSimPlus brazed plate fins exchanger module),
- They are not able to take into account the complexity of fluids and flows sequences,
- Numerical methods used do not allow the convergence as soon as the complexity of the industrial exchanged increases.