Bronswerk Heat Transfer BV Promotes Flomerics’ EFD.Pro from R&D to Mainstream Engineering Design

“It is very important to us to use EFD.Pro on a more regular basis,” said Johan van der Kamp, chief design engineer. “But we are not analysis specialists and we do not know the full potential of what the technology can do for us.” To facilitate a successful transfer of “CFD know-how” from one department to the next, the Bronswerk engineering team has recruited two college students. Bas Bovenkamp and Willert Boevee, who will be graduating with mechanical engineering degrees in June from the prominent Windesheim School of Engineering and Design in the Netherlands, are working on this project as a part of their undergraduate coursework. “So far we have found EFD.Pro quite easy. You don’t need to be an expert at CFD; however, you need to be familiar with the item being studied,” said Bovenkamp and Boevee.

Bronswerk is a leading designer and manufacturer of heat exchangers (shell & tube and air-cooled), condensers, heaters, blowers, compressors and fans. Their products are used in the pharmaceutical, process and oil/gas industries by such notable organizations as Shell, Bayer, Philips and Nestle. Last year EFD.Pro was instrumental in the design and verification of a series of ground-breaking air-cooled coolers and fans. Having seen the successful use of CFD technology in their R&D department, Bronswerk was keen on using the technology for everyday engineering. To start the process, Bovenkamp and Boevee started to work on several examples based on flow through tubes to understand the full power of the software. A large proportion of the heat exchanger market consists of the tube-type heat exchanger. Tube heat exchangers are preferred for various applications due to availability of historical performance data and the range of temperature and pressure which they can withstand. “Tubes are deceptively simple-looking on the surface; however, flow through tube bundles can be very complex as the fluid may experience both laminar and turbulent regimes. When you add heat transfer to the equation then the problem becomes even more complex,” said Boevee. “We have created a fair number of visualization plots as a result of these tests. They help us see what is really happening inside these tubes. It’s a great insight when you are able to see under which conditions the flow changes or when laminar flow becomes turbulent and how quickly,” added Bovenkamp.

As a by-product of this research, Boevee and Bovenkamp have created a “how-to” manual for the engineering team. This manual offers step-by-step instructions on how to use EFD.Pro for specific projects. “As EFD.Pro is a general purpose CFD tool, it has a lot of functionalities. Our range of applications is quite well defined so we wanted to create a handbook that would guide our engineers without having to get up a steep learning curve every time we want to work on a project,” said Van der Kamp. “With this new Bronswerk ‘how to’ manual, all our designers will be able to use EFD.Pro to its full potential for everyday engineering.”