Improve seawater cooling with titanium finned tubes

Seawater offers an endless supply of cooling water for these coastal processing facilities. But users must address seawater's corrosive nature in selecting construction materials for heat exchangers. Copper-nickel or carbon steel tubing fails continually under seawater service. This paper reports that titanium tubes, once thought to be too expensive a material for heat exchanger tubing, offer a unique combination of high material strength, excellent resistance to corrosion, and endurance to erosion by seawater. Titanium's superior physical properties in combination with enhanced surface area of low finned tubing perform the same heat duty with half the lineal footage of traditional heat exchanger tubes. High density low finned tubes multiply heat transfer capacity by a factor of two compared to plain tube. The technology applies in retrofit and original equipment manufacture (OEM) situations. It works best when the ratio of heat transfer coefficients is 2:1 or higher between the seawater coolant and shellside flow being cooled.