Development of Decision Support System for Design Analysis of Gasifier Reactor’s Heat Exchanger

Abstract

The design of a heat exchanger, a device that transfers thermal heat energy between two fluids or more that are in thermal contact, presents some level of difficulty and requires a complex design. The sensitivity of the design to changes in system and operating parameters makes the design or redesign challenging. A quick and dependable computer-based tool was used to automatically design shell and tube heat exchangers, and this tool was created using MATLAB programming software to optimize the design parameters, minimize computation time, and maximize efficiency. From the result obtained, the result of the decision support system correlates with the documentation manual at 0.9954, and computation time was reduced by 91.72% for full data processing and 98.33% to 99.41 for the iteration process. The associated delay observed in the manual method is majorly in the area of computation, not input, as in the case of the Decision Support System.  This study serves a critical purpose in advancing the efficiency and reliability of thermal systems. By automating the design process and optimizing key parameters, this research significantly enhances the precision and speed of engineering decisions.