Gulf Petrochemical Industries Company (GPIC) uses natural gas which is readily available in Bahrain as a feedstock for the production of ammonia, urea and methanol.

Gulf Petrochemical Industries Company (GPIC) uses natural gas which is readily available in Bahrain as a feedstock for the production of ammonia, urea and methanol. In one of the process plants of GPIC, there exists a requirement to design a heat exchanger to cool down the methanol/ammonia thus produced. The engineers in GPIC has proposed to use sea water to cool down the hot fluid. An existing central cooling system of GPIC is used to cool the water taken from sea to 12 ̊C. Further, this sea water is used to cool the given hot fluid. In order to avoid any delay in the process, this task has been given to Bahrain Polytechnic students as their project in the course of Applied and Process Heat Transfer. Students need to develop and provide an initial design of a Shell and Tube Heat Exchanger considering heat transfer properties like log mean temperature difference, size of the shell and tubes, materials of shell and tube, pressure drop, overall heat transfer coefficient, etc.