The heat exchanger area, A0, should make full use of the allowable pressure drops for both

streams and satisfy the basic design equation

Two additional equations are needed that relate the exchanger area to the film coefficients and
allowable pressure drops. Two compact formulations recently developed by Serna [10] are used
within this algorithm. For turbulent flow in the tube side, the compact formula that accounts for
pressure drop in both straight tubes and tube ends is given by:

while for turbulent flow of the shell-side fluid, the following compact formulation based on the
BellDelaware method is used:

where PS and PT are the allowable pressure drops for the shell side and for the tube side,
respectively. We later show the definitions for KS, KT , m, and n, and how these parameters
depend on the geometric parameters of the exchanger and the fluid physical properties.

These equations apply for steady-state operation, constant fluid physical properties, and adiabatic
operation. All physical properties are evaluated at the average fluid temperature for the tube and
shell sides. It must be emphasized that these compact formulations are the consequence of an
analytical treatment of the original equations—not empirical correlations—and therefore are valid
for the same degree of applications as the original design methods from which they were
developed; thus, the compact formulation for the shell side has the same assumptions and
expected accuracy as the original Bell-Delaware method [8].

The parameters KT , KS, n, and m from the compact formulas depend on the exchanger
configuration, which is not known until the problem is solved. Also, we have a coupled-nonlinear
problem at hand. To develop an efficient algorithm, we use the parameters from the compact
formulations as search variables and decouple the equations with the unknown variables hT , hS,
and A0. By reworking the simultaneous system of Eqs. (1)–(3), two sequential algebraic equations
for hT and hS can be obtained:

Specify design data. These data include (1) mass flowrates, physical properties, inlet and outlet
temperatures, fouling factors, and allowable pressure drops for each stream; (2) inside and
outside tube diameters, tube pitch, number of tube passes, and tube layout; and (3) the
clearances and the baffle cut on the shell side. The heat duty and the correction factor FT are
calculated from the specifications of the group of data (1).
We have used this algorithm for the solution of several design problems, and the results have
shown that most designs with an integer number of baffles fall within the range 0.8 ≤ Sm/Sw ≤ 1.2
[10].