Development of dual platform mobile app for the design of shell-and-tube heat exchangers

• Main Author: Chua, Wen Wei
• Other Authors: Leong Kai Choong
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2020
• Subjects: Engineering::Mechanical engineering
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/141452
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Shell-and-tube heat exchangers are commonly utilised in large chemical productions which require heating and cooling of large volumes of fluids. They are considered to be the more efficient variation of heat exchangers due to their versatility, effectiveness and compactness. Therefore, much research was done over the past few decades to design the most optimal and cost-efficient shell-and-tube heat exchanger in the respective different applications. The design of a shell-and-tube heat exchanger is a tedious process and hence, multiple software applications were developed over the past few years to give the contractors a much pleasant experience. Moreover, since mobile technologies are on a rise nowadays, this project therefore aims to develop a mobile application for both Android and iOS which allows the user to virtually fabricate a shell-and-tube heat exchanger at their fingertips. A few mobile applications (apps) for the design of shell-and tube heat exchangers have been developed by previous students for their final year project. However, all of the created apps were only able to work on the Android platform but not on the iOS platform. This project serves to improve upon several features of these mobile applications. In terms of determining the feasibility of the design of the shell-and-tube heat exchanger, more parameters which are closely tied to and guided by the TEMA Handbook, are introduced in this project. In terms of the feature of exporting the design results as a pdf document, the previous application is only able to export the pdf document into a folder hidden deep within the software, which proves to be not so user-friendly. Therefore, this project aims to address that issue by directly saving the pdf file in the “Downloads” folder of each individual mobile phone, as well as adding the ability to seamlessly upload the pdf file onto the cloud platforms such as Google Drive. In terms of demonstrating the duality in using the application in both Android and iOS, the previous projects were only established on the Android platform. Hence, this project aims to successfully show the usability of the application on the iOS platform as well.