Standards Development

Scope

This document specifies the requirements and recommendations for the energy efficiency testing and evaluation of liquid-to-liquid plate heat exchangers.

This document covers gasketed, semi-welded, welded and brazed plate heat exchangers.

Purpose

Plate heat exchanger has the advantages of compact structure and high efficiency and is thus widely
used in various industrial applications to replace conventional shall-and-tube heat exchanger. Although
heat exchangers play an important role in the industrial secondary energy utilization, waste heat
recovery, energy saving and emission reduction, they have to consume much pumping or blowing
power inevitably because of the viscous fluid flowing. How to evaluate quantitatively and grade their
energy efficiency is becoming a key issue. Although extensive works were done and numbers of
indexes were proposed for the performance evaluation of enhanced heat transfer technology, no index
was obtained to evaluate the energy efficiency quantitatively and grade the heat exchangers. And the
relevant standards are absent, which cause the market disorders and global trade barriers.
To solve those problems, we propose the energy efficiency index (EEI) for plate heat exchanger
evaluation and grading in this project. EEI describes the heat transfer coefficient for the unit flow
pressure drop of heat exchangers. The higher the EEI, the higher the heat flux for the unit pump power.
EEI can be used to quantitatively evaluate and grade the energy efficiency of plate heat exchangers,
and has been successfully applied to more than 300 plate heat exchangers.
The justification of this theory can refer to the attached research paper.