History of plate heat exchangers

Necessity is the mother of invention: the beginnings of heat exchange devices and the first exchangers

At the end of the 19th century, there was rapid technological and scientific development, with some fields experiencing explosive growth. During this time, prototypes of devices emerged, without which we cannot imagine life today, such as the telephone or the automobile. Science was also advancing.

In France, the famous chemist and medical figure Louis Pasteur was active, who developed the process of pasteurization, heating food to a certain temperature to cleanse it of bacteria and extend its shelf life. The process was quickly implemented, especially in milk processing. The need of the food industry at that time was to invent efficient devices capable of flow operation and quick heating of food media. Especially when the first indications appeared that unpasteurized stale milk could cause tuberculosis.

✅At that time, the first large cities emerged, similar to today's, with a rapidly growing population creating a high demand for milk supplied from rural areas. However, it had to arrive unspoiled to minimize losses. Many companies likely began searching for a solution to the problem, and the solution could only be one - a heat exchanger that would be more efficient than traditional milk boiling.

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The first patents for heat exchangers

✅The heat exchanger was most likely patented for the first time in Germany in 1878.
However, the invention was not commercially exploited and among the numerous inventions of the era, it was perhaps not fully recognized by society, except perhaps by those in the food industry.
✅However, in 1910, the first company was established in Great Britain, which for many years was very recognizable precisely due to the production of heat exchangers - the company APV. In some old systems, you can still find exchangers under this brand, in many countries (of course, these are not pre-war exchangers, but those produced, for example, in the 1990s). APV started producing heat exchangers dedicated to pasteurization, but also for brewing, where it had to quickly and economically cool wort (minimize the time and water needed to cool the wort).
✅The plate heat exchanger - APV patented in 1923. Many people consider this date to be realistically the beginning of plate heat exchangers - meaning that these devices took on a form more or less like they have today.
✅ However, parallel to the British company, similar devices were being developed in Sweden, where in 1932, the company Alfa Laval also patented a plate heat exchanger. In Scandinavia, the year 1932 is widely regarded as the creation date of plate heat exchangers, not 1923 as in the Anglo-Saxon world.

Until World War II, these devices were somewhat imperfect. However, work was being done to improve them, especially since they found increasingly wider applications with the growing industry. Private entrepreneurs from the USA, Germany, Great Britain, and Scandinavia contributed greatly to their improvement.

The Development of Heat Exchanger Technology After World War II

After World War II, a new impetus for the development of heat exchanger production was the trend that emerged in many large cities around the world to supply homes and buildings with district heating from municipal heat networks. Especially with the construction of huge panel housing estates both in the West and in the Eastern Bloc.
The simplest way to connect a building to a district heating network was precisely with a heat exchanger.

Today, it is believed that the invention of the heat exchanger was the key to the extensive development of district heating networks. Without this invention, connecting a large number of buildings to district heating would have been impossible, as it would quickly become pressure-inefficient. The heat exchanger, which separated each building, allowed the pressure in the municipal network to be maintained – enabling cost optimization and the possibility of connecting more buildings. In some European cities, district heating has essentially become a foundation. An example of a city that has embraced this heating model is Warsaw, Poland, which boasts the largest district heating network in Europe, spanning 1,800 kilometers of pipes. Heat exchangers, though often unnoticed, have revolutionized certain aspects of life in entire cities.

• ✅ BLOG: The History of District Heating and Urban Heating Networks

Only plate models?

In the meantime, work was underway on other solutions, as the plate heat exchanger was just one idea. In the 20th century, technology for tubular or shell-and-tube heat exchangers was also developed. The reason for their emergence was the need to ensure effective heat exchange - but for high water flows, where the plate heat exchanger didn't always perform well

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