Indian Journal of Cryogenics

One of the key components of helium refrigerator/liquefier (HRL) plant is heat exchangers working at cryogenic temperature. For some cases, heat exchangers with effectiveness less than 90% can be a reason for failure of helium plant to produce liquid helium. To achieve such high effectiveness, it is necessary to use plate fin heat exchangers, which provides very high heat transfer surface area per unit volume. For the heat exchangers of HRL, High effectiveness, compact volume and low pressure drop are main optimizing parameters. The first heat exchanger whose temperature range is ∼310 K to ∼90 K is analysed with plate-fin type heat exchanger. This heat exchanger is a part of indigenous development work of HRL of ∼2 kW cooling capacity at 4.5 K at IPR. Liquid nitrogen (LN₂) is used to cool incoming hot He gas around ∼80 K. The detailed thermal and hydraulic analysis is discussed in this paper.