Shell and tube heat exchangers are commonly used in a wide range of practical engineering. The key issue in such a system is the heat exchange between the hot and cold working media. An increased cost of production of these devices has forced all manufacturing companies to reduce the total amount of used materials by better optimizing their construction. Numerous studies on the heat exchanger design codes have been carried out, basically focusing on the use of fully time-dependent partial differential equations for mass, momentum, and energy balance. They are very complex and time-consuming, especially when the designers want to have full information in a full 3D system. The paper presents the 1D mathematical model for analysis of the thermal performance of the counter-current heat exchanger comprised of mixed time-dependent and time-independent equations, solved by the upwind numerical solution method, which allows for a reduction in the CPU time for obtaining the proper solution. The comparison of numerical results obtained from an in-house program called Upwind Heat Exchanger Solver written in a Fortran code, with those derived using commercial software package ASPEN, and those obtained experimentally, shows very good agreement in terms of the temperature and pressure distribution predictions. The proposed method for fast designing calculations appears beneficial for other tube shapes and types of heat exchangers.

The aim of this work was to investigate the heat and mass transfer during thermal decomposition of a single solid fuel particle. The problem regards the pyrolysis process which occurs in the absence of oxygen in the first stage of fuel oxidation. Moreover, the mass transfer during heating of the solid fuels is the basic phenomenon in the pyrolysis-derived alternative fuels (gas, liquid and solid phase) and in the gasification process which is focused on the generation of syngas (gas phase) and char (solid phase). Numerical simulations concern pyrolysis process of a single solid particle which occurs as a consequence of the particle temperature increase. The research was aimed at an analysis of the influence of particle physical properties on the devolatilization process. In the mathematical modeling the fuel grain is treated as an ideal sphere which consists of porous material (solid and gaseous phase), so as to simplify the final form of the partial differential equations. Assumption that the physical properties change only in the radial direction, reduces the partial derivatives of the angular coordinates. This leads to obtaining the equations which are only the functions of the radial coordinate. The model consists of the mass, momentum and energy equations for porous spherical solid particle heated by the stream of hot gas. The mass source term was determined in the wide range of the temperature according to the experimental data. The devolatilization rate was defined by the Arrhenius formula. The results of numerical simulation show that the heating and devolatilization time strongly depend on the physical properties of fuel. Moreover, proposed model allows to determine the pyrolysis process direction, which is limited by the equilibrium state.

In the present paper, the one-dimensional model for heat and mass transfer in fixed coal bed was proposed to describe the thermal and flow characteristics in a coke oven chamber. For the purpose of the studied problem, the analysis was limited to the calculations of temperature field and pyrolytic gas yield. In order to verify the model, its theoretical predictions for temperature distribution during wet coal charge carbonization were compared with the measurement results found in the literature. In general, the investigation shows good qualitative agreement between numerical and experimental data. However, some discrepancy regarding the temperature characteristics at the stage of evaporation was observed.