Introduction and classification of heat transfer equipment

Efficiency trends in process industries, power generation, manufacturing, and transportation are associated nowadays with significant increase in temperature and pressure of the working media resulting in higher heat fluxes and fluids specific enthalpies, as well as increasingly demanding design requirements. Those changes encourage development of new types of heat transfer equipment capable to meet the more severe conditions of the existing operations, as well as to satisfy multiple engineering applications in heating and cooling where traditional heat exchangers cannot be used cost-effectively. So the heat transfer equipment can be considered as a spectrum of special design systems that allow transferring the thermal energy from one heat carrier to another, wherein the heat transfer media may be either liquid or gaseous.