Printed circuit PCHE heat exchangers also find important applications in the oil and gas sector, serving as Gas Turbine Performance Heaters. This type of application also offers the opportunity to turn heat recovery into a performance lever.
Gas turbines are extremely sensitive to fluid conditions, in terms of temperature, fluid density, and thermal profile stability. In many industrial applications (power generation, oil and gas, LNG, hydrogen-ready plants), precise control of gas temperature is essential to improve efficiency, reduce operational instabilities, and protect the equipment during transient conditions. This is where the Gas Turbine Performance Heater is involved.
A Gas Turbine Performance Heater is essentially a heat exchanger designed for gas preheating (air, fuel gas, process gas), with a controlled ΔT, high reliability, and often undergoing high pressure and continuous service. Typical applications include fuel gas conditioning, intake air heating, and heat recovery systems from oil/hot water/waste heat recovery circuits.
Tempco proposes PCHE exchangers as particularly suited to this role, as they offer significant key advantages over traditional shell-and-tube solutions:
- Extremely compact
- Resistance to high pressures (tens/hundreds of bar)
- Perfect thermal stability even with rapid gradients
- Minimal fluid accumulation → safety + fast response
- Channel geometry optimizable upon the actual operating point
In performance-driven turbine applications, this makes the difference.
PCHE + Turbine: a smart technical marriage
As a performance heater, the PCHE allows:
- very precise control of the inlet gas temperature
- low pressure drops (if properly designed)
- easy integration into compact skids
- reliable operation even in:
◦ offshore environments
◦ frequent start/stop cycles
◦ severe conditions (H₂ blend, dry gases, LNG boil-off)
When the focus is performance + reliability, the PCHE is often the most engineered choice, not just the most compact.
A double advantage is therefore achieved when increased performance is achieved by implementing a heat recovery system, and this is where the application becomes very interesting, when the PCHE is served by:
- heat recovery circuits
- jacket water
- hot oil
- process waste heat
The result is an increase in the overall efficiency of the system, a reduction in auxiliary consumption, and improved operational control of the turbine.
Tempco therefore positions itself as a strategic technology partner for the development and implementation of this type of application, providing not only the technology but also support for the engineering, in defining the actual duty cycle and verifying turbine-side pressure drops – a highly critical issue – and then ensuring the integration of PCHEs into complete skids and technical dialogue with EPCs and turbine OEMs. The PCHE is not a standard component, but a solution tailored to the plant.
In conclusion, the use of PCHEs as Gas Turbine Performance Heaters represents a natural, highly innovative evolution of high-performance applications in the oil and gas sector, effectively addressing the needs for compactness, safety, and control. Representing a perfect example of applied thermal engineering as a special and customized, non-standard solution.
