INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN AERONAUTICAL AND MECHANICAL ENGINEERING Vol.1 Issue.8, December 2013. Pgs: 20-45 Pawan Kumar Gupta 20 ISSN (ONLINE): 2321-3051 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN AERONAUTICAL AND MECHANICAL ENGINEERING MINIMIZATION OF HEAT TRANSFER AREA OF AN AIR COMPRESSOR INTERCOOLER USING MATLAB® Pawan Kumar Gupta Sr.Lecturer, er.pawan2008@gmail.com , Department of Mechanical Engineering, Babu Banarsi Das National Institute of Technology & Management, Lucknow, U.P., India Abstract Intercooling of air compressors is necessary for an efficient process. A heat exchanger of shell and tube type particularly suitable as an intercooler between compression stages of a compressor. A characteristic of heat exchanger design is the procedure of specifying a design, heat transfer area and pressure drops and checking whether the assumed design satisfies all requirements or not. The purpose of my research paper is to provide an easy and efficient way to design of an air compressor intercooler. Design methodology is based on the open literature and latest standard provided by the TEMA to industry. This paper describes modelling of heat exchanger which is based on the minimization of heat transfer area and a flow chart is provided showing the designing procedure involved. Based on the proposed algorithm MATLAB ® code is prepared. Computer codes for design are organized to vary systematically the exchanger parameters such as, shell diameter, baffle spacing, number of tube-side pass to identify configurations that satisfy the specified heat transfer and pressure drops. A case study is provided for which the program is run and the results obtained are compared with the available from industry data. Keywords: Air Compressor; Intercooler; Heat Exchanger; Shell & Tube Heat Exchanger. 1. INTRODUCTION Industrial plants use compressed air throughout their production operations, which is produced by compressed air units ranging from 5 hp to over 50,000 hp. It is worth noting that the running cost of a compressed air system is far higher than the cost of a compressor itself. The US Department of Energy (2003) reports that 70% to 90% of compressed air is lost in the form of unusable heat, friction, misuse and noise. For this reason, compressors and compressed air systems are important areas to improve energy efficiency at industrial plants. For improving efficiency compression is done in more than one stage and between each stage intercooler is provided. Intercooler improves the quality of air and reduces inlet air temperature. On doing this large quantities of condensate (water) are formed. Disentrainment of liquids can be a problem in intercooler systems of compressor plants, so proper separator arrangement should be made without considerable pressure drop. In industry, reciprocating compressors are the most widely used type for air compression. 1.1 Brief description of Air Compressor “A machine which draws in air at atmospheric pressure then compresses it to pressures higher than atmospheric and delivers it at a rate sufficient to operate pneumatic tools or equipment.”