Design verification of heat exchanger for ballast water treatment

Abstract

Using waste heat from ship’s engines is one of the methods considered for heat treatment of ballast water. For such a system harvesting the engine exhaust heat, a heat exchanger will be vital. Design optimisation of a heater employing exhaust gases of the engine as utility fluid and ballast sea water as the process fluid was achieved using Lagrangian methods, keeping the annual cost as the objective function. Costs for installation, maintenance as also costs for the utility and process fluids were considered. Heat balance data, specific fuel consumption values from a typical operational ship and current fuel costs were considered for the design. The thermodynamic and geometric designs were worked out using computer based software for comparing the designs. Costs were also computed using a different approach for all the designs. Since the amount of heat transferred was specified and the application was limited to a single process, direct cost method was used for the computation. The objective function values obtained from Lagrangian equations were compared with the values obtained from direct cost computations. From the optimal designs, choice was justified based on annual cost, optimum exit temperature of shell side fluid and optimum mass flow of tube side fluid.