Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction is penetrating the market for printed circuit heat exchangers (PCHE), the so-called next-generation heat exchangers. The company announced recently that it had secured the core technology for flow path design and the process technology and had recently installed a 600-ton hot press, which has the capacity to manufacture large PCHEs.
A PCHE is an upgraded heat exchanger that is built by having the photochemical machining process applied to create microchannel flow paths into a flat plate, with the plates then being stacked together and diffusion bonded.
A PCHE boasts of a minimum 90% improvement in heat exchanging efficiency compared to the conventional tube heat exchangers as it can be manufactured into a compact size that is one-tenth the size of conventional heat exchangers or even smaller. Moreover, it uses high-grade materials, such as stainless steel and superalloys, so that it can withstand even harsh operating conditions such as ultra-high temperatures reaching up to 900°C and ultra-high pressure of up to 1500 bar.
The PCHE market in Korea is forecasted to grow to a market size of around KRW 200bn by 2030.