The Industrial Uses of Cold Plate Heat Exchangers

Effective thermal management appears in various forms these days, and in most cases, heat exchangers are designed in equally different ways to achieve optimal results. Cold plate heat exchangers, for example, can be designed for all types of  systems that need high effective heat transfer coefficients around large surfaces.

Cold plates, that are usually crafted from stacked and metal together, are able to provide reliable, highly effective, and reliable thermal management solutions for all high-performance operations.

What Is a Liquid Cold plate?

A cold plate is responsible for absorbing the heat from the devices and shifting or transferring it to a single-phase liquid coolant that is circulating through internal channels of the cold plate and subsequently rejecting it downstream to a radiator. And here are several thermal/mechanical advantages of a cold plate solution.

How Plate Heat Exchangers Work

Because cold plates are made with metal, they offer few levels of natural conduction to seep and transfer heat. This capability is enhanced with a cooling fluid, e.g, water, that flows through pathways that are machined and attached into the cold plates.

The heat that the plates absorb from one side is automatically transferred to the other side by the fluid, providing consistent and uniform thermal management around the surface of the heat plates.

When They're Most Appropriate

Because of their high-performance abilities, plate heat exchangers are the ideal thermal management solution in a lot of different industries, including:

Food and beverage production – In addition to cooling manufacturing equipment, food and beverage production is also sustained on several processes which hinge on effective, large-scale thermal management. Pasteurization, for example, can often perform with minimum energy and consistent results with the use of plate heat exchangers.

Power production – In dealing with high levels of electricity, the machinery in most of the power plants can be exposed to high levels of thermal energy. To avoid the  overheating of machine oil, bearings, gaskets,  and other vital components, many plants sustained on plate heat exchangers for efficient and eco-friendly cooling.

Welded Plate Heat Exchangers

Due to the gasketed plate heat exchanger technology is maturing, it is becoming apparent that a gasketed design restricted plate technology is widely used in many industrial processes.

To satisfy this demand, a vast range of welded plate heat exchanger designs developed to meet the different process requirements with the passage of time.

Welded plate heat exchangers use the equivalent principles as of their gasketed counterpart but they employ a fusion weld to close the fluid flow channel instead of the gasket.

And The result is a fully welded heat transfer plate pack.

While incorporating the plenty of advantages of the corrugated plate design, welded plate heat exchangers often offer other unique benefits that extend the operating range of plate technology. They include:

●Design pressure up to 600 psig (50 bar) that design temperature up to 650oF (343oC).

●Provide Low maintenance costs because gasket replacement is not required.

●Configuration allows easy access and cleaning on both sides.

●Ensure High resistance to thermal plus mechanical fatigue for cyclic applications.

●It Improved safety and reliability.

Welded plate heat exchangers are mostly used more frequently in chemically aggressive processes. Where the base chemicals and may be entrained contaminants in the process stream to preclude the use of gaskets.

For this reason, welded plate heat exchangers are used increasingly in all sphere of process industry,

including oil and gas production

●refineries;

●hydrocarbon processing units

●primaries,

●intermediates

●and polymers;

●pharmaceutical plus specialty fine chemicals;

●and inorganic chemicals production for instance

●chlor-alkali or

●hydrogen peroxide.

One of the best uses of welded heat exchangers is its an interchanger for heat recovery plus absorption-stripping and distillation unit operations.

Welded plate heat exchangers can handle temperature across in a single compact unit. It provides greater heat recovery than that of other designs.

Also, welded units are used as a reboiler or condenser  because they offer large cross-flow area, and  short flow path (low pressure drop) plus flexible connection sizes.

Using cold plates to transfer heat

The goal of a heat exchanger is to create a loop where an eco-friendly cooling fluid can absorb electrical waste heat and transfer it somewhere it can be safely dissipated. The fluid flows back to the heat source to continue collecting heat, creating a looped liquid cooling system that requires significantly less energy and space than more traditional cooling solutions. Cold plates enhance heat transfer processes by using conduction to transfer heat from the plates’ surface to the cooling liquid flowing through its internal pathways. The continuous heat transfer process allows for high-performance electrical thermal management for a wide range of advanced applications.

Advantages of cold plate heat exchangers

Cold plate heat exchangers are often preferred for several different reasons. For example, by stacking several plates within the solution, designers can create higher levels of heat transfer without needing excessive space to do so.

High heat transfer coefficient (h)

High heat load and heat flux capacity

Scalable

Adaptable to any temperature range

Cold plates and their flow paths can also be custom-designed to ensure optimal results for any given application’s parameters.

For companies that rely on processes that require optimal heat transfer across large surfaces, cold plates can also provide the most efficient and effective solution.

With their innovative heat transfer processes and minimal need for maintenance, cold plate heat exchangers can help companies significantly streamline several areas of their operations.

Cold plates are considered the best option and Some of the large benefits for using heat exchangers is  they help companies in virtually all industries improve their thermal management processes.

Whereas lowering their energy usage and overall costs. Because of their unique versatility and high-performance capabilities, cold plates are sometimes preferred for applications. And that requires transferring heat across large surfaces.

Or maintaining consistent temperatures for precise thermal management processes. For instance, cold plates can be utilized in food and beverage manufacturing processes to bear several vital thermal management processes, including pasteurization and packaging.

Cold Plate design and analysis we Offer

When designing a cold plate there are several challenges to overcome in order to create an optimal design. In many cases, there are trade-offs between design options. Winsharethermolly has significant experience in meeting thermal needs while Lowering operating and manufacturing costs. Below are several performance features we will analyze as part of the design:

●Pressure drop

●Liquid flow path

●Flow balancing

●Material compatibility

●Fluid Stability

●Temperature Uniformity

●Maximum Temperature

●Weight / Size