University of Lincoln and Specialist Heat Exchangers Limited KTP 24_25 R3

Specialist Heat Exchangers Limited is building a digital tool that lets any engineer design a bonded insert cooler directly inside industry-standard software, rather than relying on manual calculations or specialist knowledge. Heat exchangers are critical components in power plants, chemical processing, and refrigeration systems. The bonded insert coolers at the centre of this project use a metal surface bonded to the inside of a tube to improve heat transfer. Currently, designing these coolers requires expertise that only a handful of engineers possess, which limits their adoption and slows down product development. This project aims to embed the company’s proven physical model into widely used design software such as HTRI, making the design process accessible to any qualified engineer. If successful, the tool could reduce design time from weeks to hours and allow manufacturers to specify bonded insert coolers more easily. That would improve energy efficiency in industrial cooling systems—a sector where even small gains in heat transfer reduce electricity consumption and operational costs. The project is applied commercial research with a clear practical endpoint: a software integration that changes how an existing product is specified and sold.