The vaporization of low-temperature waste heat within industrial processes undoubtedly plays a crucial role in
improving overall energy efficiency of industrial processes. The European Union launched several projects that aim
at the development of innovative technologies to generate electricity by recovering low-temperature waste heat (<
120°C) using ORC. One of the basic concepts that will be investigated for heat extraction from gases is a direct heat
exchanger, which is a finned-tube evaporator featuring a direct exchange between flue gases and the working fluid.
For wet gas heat sources (Tdp > 50°C), the temperatures of tube and fin surfaces are generally below the water dew
point temperature, leading to simultaneous heat and mass transfer tube and fin surfaces, then part of the finned-tube
evaporator will operate in dehumidifying conditions.
In view of the operating temperature, the counter-current configuration must be carefully designed to minimize
temperature differences between hot and cold fluids. Pressure losses can be minimized using compact designs.
Several studies are related to finned-tube heat exchangers. Shah et al. (1978) and Van den Bulck (1991) employed
optimal distribution of the UA value across the volume of cross flow heat exchangers and optimized different design
variables like fin thickness, fin height, and fin pitch. Bejan (1978) and Bejan (1979) used the concept of
irreversibility for estimating and minimizing the usable energy wasted in heat-exchanger design and presented an
optimum design method for balanced and imbalanced counter-flow heat exchangers. He proposed the use of a
“Number of Entropy Production Units” as a basic parameter in describing heat exchanger performance. Later on,
Khan et al. (2006) optimized the design of tube banks in cross flow using Entropy Generation Minimization method
(EGM). In the present study, the exergy analysis is used to derive optimal geometrical configuration of the ORC
evaporator. The parameters of the studied heat source are shown in Table 1.