Pôster:

Due to the dynamism in chemical industry process operation, there aresituations in which it is necessary to enhance the heat transfer, such as the one studiedin this paper: an increase in required heat load for production raise. A technique thatmay solve this problem is the insertion of devices in the tubes of shell-and-tube heatexchangers, called tube inserts. Regarding the great variety of these inserts, thepresent work aims to build an approach that is able to identify, among a list of tubeinserts, the most viable technical and economically to enhance heat exchangers. Tostructure this approach, correlations available in the literature for each tube insertwere used to evaluate the technical performance, whilst the economic performanceevaluation was based on a comparison between the cost of buying a new heatexchanger and the cost of operation after the inserts installation, with and withoutneed to replace the process pump. Then, the approach was tested in the case study andit was possible to observe that the inserts efficiency in heat transfer enhancement isquite prominent. Depending on the insert used, the results showed that the heatexchange can be increased from two to almost four times; however, the pressure dropfollowed the same trend, rising even more intensely. This efficiency was also shown inthe economic analysis, which made it clear that the use of tube inserts can, financially,be the most advantageous option.