Bespoke mini heat exchange system
12 Sep 2013
Ormiston Wire recently designed a bespoke heat exchange tool to help solve a problem one of its customers was having with a piece of machinery.
Drawing on its knowledge and expertise, Ormiston Wire were able to design, develop and manufacture a mini wire-wound turbulator for its client.
With a series of loop turns, it consisted of an outside diameter of 3mm, as compared to the slightly larger sizes available in Ormiston’s existing ranges of turbulators.
Wire turbulators have many advantages over Fin or Spiral sheet metal types for, as well as benefiting immensely from Ormiston Wire’s own looped-spiral design, they can be adapted or even custom-built to suit a customer’s particular specifications.
Upon initial trials, the miniature turbulator was successfully tested and, like other turbulators in the range, now comes in a choice of metals suited to specific applications.
For longer tube lengths, individual turbulators can be simply and quickly joined together. This economises on the length, diameter or number of tubes required per unit and allows flow pumps to be kept to a minimum size.
The efficiency of the turbulators is further enhanced by the fact that they do not need to be fixed in the tubes, the wires themselves gripping tightly within a normal flow of liquid or gas.
Typically, when fluid flows through a tube frictional drag creates a slower moving boundary layer at the tube wall.
When the tube wall is cooler than the fluid flowing through the tube, then viscosity at the wall is greater than that at the centre of the tube, reinforcing the boundary layer. This provides a resistance to heat transfer, which in turn restricts performance.
Ormiston spiral wire wound turbulators are designed to regularly disrupt this cool boundary layer and re-mix this disrupted fluid with the warmer bulk fluid towards the centre of the tube.
This reduces the temperature difference across the tube bore, minimising the boundary layer resistance.
