HTRI Xchanger Suite

Rate, simulate, and design heat transfer equipment

Xchanger Suite^®—considered to be the most advanced thermal process design and simulation software—rates, simulates, and/or designs a variety of heat transfer equipment. HTRI’s calculation methods are backed by over half a century of applied research and data collected on industrially relevant heat transfer equipment. Based on the results of this ongoing effort, we update our methods to meet your evolving engineering needs.

All Xchanger Suite components are highly flexible, allowing rigorous specification of the exchanger geometry. This capability makes the best use of HTRI’s proprietary heat transfer and pressure drop correlations and allows the most accurate performance predictions possible for all exchangers.

Features

Modern, graphical user interface that allows the user to have multiple case files (containing both text and graphical inputs/outputs) open at the same time.
Fully incremental calculation modules compute localized heat transfer and pressure drop using local fluid properties.
Includes VMGThermo™, an extensive and rigorous fluid physical property generator from Virtual Materials Group, Inc.
Extensive output reports provide detailed results, including local profiles of all important parameters.
Comprehensive online help provides background information, graphs, explanation of input panels and output reports, user tips, and more.
Graphs and scale drawings provide in-depth visualization of calculated results.
Includes extensive, user-extendable databank for materials of construction.
Interfaces to
- process simulators
- physical property databanks
- mechanical design programs
- Exchanger Optimizer™
- integrated engineering software
- user-written applications in Microsoft^® Excel^® and other programming languages
- CAPE-OPEN compliant applications
Imports shell-and-tube and plate-fin exchanger input files from HTFS™, Honeywell’s UniSim^® Heat Exchangers, and Aspen Exchanger Design & Rating products.
Exchanger Optimizer™ can now be launched from within Xchanger Suite to generate comprehensive cost assessments and validate designs based on ASME code calculations.

Components

Xace

Rate, simulate, and design air coolers and economizers, including natural draft (fans off) and forced draft conditions. Xace includes vendor fan selection calculations and options to simulate the effect of flow and temperature maldistribution.

Xist Xhpe Xjpe

Rate, simulate, and design virtually any type of shell-and-tube exchanger, including kettles, hairpins, thermosiphons, reflux condensers, and falling film evaporators. Xist supports all standard TEMA exchanger types, and includes integrated tools for flow-induced vibration calculations and tube layout design.

Xpfe

Simulate and design multi-stream axial and crossflow plate-fin exchangers using an incremental model with research-based heat transfer and pressure drop correlations. Xpfe contains graphical layout tools that make even complex stream arrangements easy to create.

Xphe

Rate, simulate, and design plate-and-frame exchangers using user-defined plate types or plates selected from an internal manufacturers’ databank. Xphe contains a port maldistribution model that calculates the flow through each plate channel.

Xspe

Rate and simulate single-phase spiral plate exchangers using an incremental model with HTRI-validated heat transfer and pressure drop correlations. Xspe models cocurrent and countercurrent spiral flow (Type I exchangers).

Xvib

Calculate flow-induced vibration for a tube in a shell-and-tube exchanger using a rigorous finite element based algorithm. Xvib considers fluidelastic instability and vortex shedding mechanisms for both plain and U-tubes.

Xfh

Simulate the performance of cylindrical and box heaters. Xfh uses a Hottel zoning method to calculate localized radiant and process side performance. Additional combustion and convection section modules allow evaluation of a complete process fired heater. For single-zone modeling, use Xfh^® Ultra, our general-purpose fired heater program.

Works With...

HTRI Xchanger Suite works with many major software packages for physical properties, process simulation, mechanical design, integrated engineering, and fan selection.

Physical Properties

Software	Company
Aspen Plus*	Aspen Technology, Inc.
Aspen HYSYS	Aspen Technology, Inc.
Petro-SIM	KBC Advanced Technologies, Inc.
PPDS	TUV NEL Ltd.
PRO/II	AVEVA Software, LLC
ProMax	Bryan Research & Engineering, LLC
REFPROP	NIST
Simulis Thermodynamics*	ProSim S.A.
UniSim Design	Honeywell International Inc.
VMGThermo (distributed with Xchanger Suite)	Virtual Materials Group, Inc.

*via CAPE-OPEN

Process Simulation

Software	Company
Aspen Plus*	Aspen Technology, Inc.
Aspen HYSYS	Aspen Technology, Inc.
Petro-SIM	KBC Advanced Technologies, Inc.
PRO/II	AVEVA Software, LLC
ProMax*	Bryan Research & Engineering, LLC
ProSim Plus*	ProSim S.A.
UniSim Design	Honeywell International Inc.
Symmetry	Virtual Materials Group, Inc.

*via CAPE-OPEN

Mechanical Design

Software	Company
Aspen EDR	Aspen Technology, Inc.
AutoPIPE Vessel (Microprotol)	Bentley Systems, Inc.
COMPRESS Exchanger	Codeware, Inc.
MT-MECH	MT3 SOLUTION srls
PASSAT	NTP Truboprovod
PVElite	Hexagon PPM
RCSWin	RCS
NEXTGEN	Sant'Ambrogio Servizi Industriali s.r.l.
Vessel Exchanger Software (VES)	Red-Bag B.V.
WIN_Shell	SSE GmbH

Integrated Engineering Software

Software	Company
Aspen Zyqad	Aspen Technology, Inc.
AXSYS.Process	Bentley Systems, Inc.
COMOS PT	Siemens AG

Fan Selection

Fan selection software from the following companies is embedded in Xace

Cofimco S.p.A.
Howden Cooling Fans
Hudson Products Corporation
The Moore Company

System Requirements

You must have the following to run Xchanger Suite 8.0 and eLibrary 2 successfully:

Microsoft^® Windows^® 8.1, Windows 10, Server 2012, Server 2016, or Server 2019
32- or 64-bit processor
2 GB RAM
Approximately 2 GB hard drive space

HTRI recommends a 2 GHz or faster processor with 4 GB RAM, as well as an XGA or better graphics adapter (1024 × 768 resolution).