In the 19th century, the design experience of heat exchangers mainly came from production practice, assembled only from cast iron light tubes. Early tubular heat exchangers were applied in fields such as steel and chemical engineering, with simple structures but large volumes and low efficiency.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the rapidly developing field of heat transfer provided important theoretical support and design basis for heat exchangers, thus ushering in a new era of development for heat exchangers. The development of tubular heat exchangers has been particularly rapid. From the earliest cast iron tube heat exchangers, various types of tubular heat exchangers such as shell and tube, sleeve, coiled tube, and serpentine tube have been developed, with rich and diverse structures.
The plate heat exchanger that emerged in the late 19th century has high heat transfer capacity and has received widespread attention. In 1930, the spiral plate heat exchanger was invented and applied. In the late 1930s, shell and plate heat exchangers were successfully developed by Sweden and mainly used in industrial pulp production. During the same period, Marston Excelsior Company used immersion brazing to produce copper and alloy plate fin heat exchangers for radiators used in aircraft engines.
Some new types of heat exchange components were gradually developed. In the mid-1960s, a new type of high-efficiency heat transfer element - heat pipe - was developed, with a thermal conductivity of about 1000 to 10000 times that of ordinary alloys. In 1981, the microchannel heat exchanger was proposed.. In 1985, the British company developed a printed circuit board heat exchanger, which demonstrated excellent heat transfer capacity and high pressure resistance, and showed wide application prospects in the new generation of molten salt nuclear reactors, solar thermal power generation, and hydrogen energy fields. The new heat exchanger has solved the inherent defects of traditional heat exchangers in some fields and improved heat transfer efficiency.