Development of a mobile-based software suite for the thermal and hydraulic design of heat exchangers

• Main Author: Shavin Shivaskar Kunasekaran
• Other Authors: Leong Kai Choong
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Mechanical engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/71665
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This final year project report is based on the development of a mobile application to aid the thermal and hydraulic designing of plate heat exchangers, with educational purposes and commercial potential in mind. The application was developed on the Apple iOS operating system, utilizing Objective-C programming language. The application was built and tested on Apple’s proprietary integrated development environment, i.e, Xcode. The main intention of selecting the Apple iOS platform was because many of the heat exchanger applications have been developed solely for Android and desktop operating systems. This application behaves as a foundation for heat exchanger applications in the Apple world and provides vast opportunities to venture deeper into the development of such educational and commercial applications. The application provides a comprehensive user interface for rating and sizing capabilities, to support the design of a plate heat exchanger, depending on user and manufacturer specifications. Referencing to various organizations and associations like Euro Inox and AISI, the main property standards were placed in the application’s core database. To increase productivity, for both students and professionals, the application allows for the exporting of both user and application results and core data into a comma separated value (CSV) format, which can be synchronised with iTunes and shared via email. Furthermore, tutorial sessions and user guides embedded in the application help enhance user experience and ease the understanding of the application interface. This final year report concludes with some limitations and recommendations put forth for future development. Generally, students prefer developing applications for the Android platform over the iOS platform due to versatility and ease in coding, testing and debugging of the application. Hence, the decision to change this aspect led to the development of this project.