Heat exchanger idea, should I build it?

During lunch at work yesterday, I was reading the high volume wort chiller thread during lunch and thought, "Hey, I think I can take this to the next level"

So I started thinking up a design, its sort of a cross between a shell and tube and counterflow heat exchanger. It would use 6 1/4" copper tubes split from a 1/2 inch inlet. There would be three inner spirals in one direction with 3 concentric spirals in the other wrapped on top of the inner layer. There would be a 1.5" PVC pipe or something to force all flow to run over the coils instead of down the middle with a 3" PVC shell on the outside.

With this design, it would use about 40' of copper pipe with about 350 in^2 of heat transfer surface. I imagine turbulent flow would be maintained in the shell as there would be many regions where the flow can mix.

If I were to build this, chilled water would flow through the shell on the opposite section of the wort. Probably just drill some holes in the PVC and epoxy in some fittings.

I made a (not so) quick model of it and have some images below. My poor laptop really didn't like this



Both sides would be enclosed of course. Also, the far side would be terminated as the close side in the rendering. It was just killing my comp so I didn't draw it.

What is the goal? More efficient because of turbulence?

cravej said:

What is the goal? More efficient because of turbulence?

Click to expand...

partially yes. partially because it looks like fun.

One of the ideas is that it ill break up thermal boundary layers and allow for much greater heat transfer with less surface area.

I think that this may go well with my closed loop evaporative wort chiller

Yes, you should build it for sure. I would be very interested to hear about the performance. Looks like it would be able to chill to near the cooling water temp in a single pass.