Suggestions regarding the new heat exchanger design

[wormzjl]

Seen that the heat exchanger is not done for overhaul yet, as a chemical engineer myself I have some suggestions regarding the design.

Here is a simplified schema for a shell-and-tube heat exchanger which is mostly used IRL

Normally the heat exchange happens between 2 fluids only in a single HX, it is divided into shell side and tube side where 2 fluids are separated. Usually the pressure on both sides are quiet different .

The material selection depends mostly on the operating conditions (temperature, pressure) and how corrosive the fluid is. Normally it is carbon steel or stainless steel, and sometimes copper or other alloys. The heat exchange efficiency is not always a concern, since one can just build a bigger one (or make a series of them) instead of upgrading to expensive and less mechanically-performant materials.

As for application for nuclearcraft, I’d recommend:

• Divide the HX into shell and tube, where shell side is the chassis, and tube side same as before. There can be only one fluid in the shell side, but possibility to have more than one fluid in different “tubes”. Shell side can be rendered as fluid tanks.
• Each fluid input must be filtered, so that when forming the structure all the processing capacity is fixed, thus improving the performance.
• Use baffles blocks in the shell side to regulate the flow, refer to pic above for placement. Too many baffles will result in a lower flowrate, too less will lead to a lower heat exchange efficiency. Applying this to Minecraft means either will lead to a lower processing efficiency.
• Fluid viscosity is something interesting to consider yet might be difficult to implement, with it one can define the maximum flowrate of fluids for different types of tubes, where one must also balance between heat exchange efficiency and max flowrate as above. Also longer tube + viscous fluid = less flowrate.
• But of course one can always add more tubes, making the exchanger bigger. The optimum inter-baffle distances can be also affected by viscosity.
• To be more sadistic, add penalty for oversized exchangers.

I understand it’s rather different with current implementation, but with this in mind, it’s very easy to make an exchanger that works, but more difficult to make it just right: Player need to optimize the tube type/count and baffle placement based on the fluids on both sides. Please let me know if you are interested in some of these ideas.

Also a question, with current forge fluid system I wonder if it’s possible to have one fluid at 2 different temperatures instead of having two fluids?

[tomdodd4598]

I've left this unanswered for a while, but should say that when I actually get to implementing the new multiblock, I'll be happy to chat about incorporating these concepts into the 'NuclearCraft-style' framework :)