A Cross-Flow Ceramic Heat Recuperator for Industrial Heat Recovery

Abstract

With increasing fuel costs, the efficient use of fuel is very important to the U.S. process heat industries. Increase in fuel usage efficiency can be obtained by transferring the waste exhaust heat to the cold combustion air. The metallic recuperators currently available suffer from problems of creep, corrosion and oxidation, particularly at high temperatures. The Department of Energy and GTE Products corporation have pursued a jointly funded venture, Contract No. EX-76-C-Q1-2162, to establish performance criteria and demonstrate a cross-flow ceramic heat recuperator for high temperature industrial heat recovery applications.

The immediate goals of the ceramic recuperator project were to demonstrate a heat exchanger capable of handling high temperatures (1600-2400oF), that is compact with a high surface area and with costs comparable to the lower temperature metal heat exchangers.

This paper describes the basic GTE Products Corporation design and details the design basis, the predicted recuperator performance, the ceramic and housing materials, the recuperator design procedure and the fabrication and assembly. The data provided includes NTU-Effectiveness and low friction and heat transfer ("f" and "J") plots.