What is a tube sheet for a heat exchanger?

Tube sheets have holes drilled to accept a series of tubes inside of an enclosed tubular pressure vessel. These pressure vessels, commonly referred to as shell and tube heat exchangers, are the most common heat exchangers used in oil refineries and large chemical plants. The tube sheet itself serves as a supporting element in heat exchangers and boilers. The tube sheet is called this because the tubes–which are carefully arranged in a specific pattern–penetrate the tube sheet in multiple places to allow the fluid within these tubes to flow in and out of the heat exchanger. The fluid flowing through the tubes within the shell exchanges heat with the fluid that flows into the shell but flows past the outside of the tubes exchanging the heat with the tube fluid.

Tubesheet application

Tubesheet is mainly used in chemical vessels, which supports fixed tubes and has great thermal conductivity. It can be widely used in tubular heat exchanger, boiler, pressure vessel, steam turbine, large central air conditioning and other industries. In the process of tubesheet inspection, the main inspection indexes are hole position, hole diameter tolerance and hole finish.

How to judge the tubesheet quality?

The precision of tubesheet processing, especially the pipe hole spacing and pipe diameter tolerance, perpendicularity and finish, greatly affects the assembly and service performance of the above listed chemical equipment. With the large-scale of chemical equipment and power station, the diameter of tubesheet is becoming larger and larger. The tubesheet with the diameter of 4m-5m is very common. The characteristics of large tubesheet are large number of holes, dense, small diameter, deep, high precision and finish requirements.

Tube sheet Size:

Tube sheet / Girth flange : Max. OD 5,000mm x 500mm thk Max. 25 Tonne

Forged Nozzle : Max. weight 25 tonne

Tube sheet Available Raw material:

Carbon steel (A105, A266 CL2/CL4)

Plate material of Baffle plate: A36, SS440, A516 Gr60/70

Low Temp Carbon steel (A350 LF2 CL1/CL2, LF3)

High Yield Carbon steel (A694 F52/F60/F65/F70)

Stainless steel (A182 F304/L, F304H, F310, F316/L, F317/L, F321/H, F347/H, F44)

Low alloy steel (A182 F1, F5, F9, F11 CL1/CL2/CL3, F12 CL1/CL2, F22 CL1/CL3, F23, F91, F92)

Duplex stainless steel ( A182 F51, F53, F60)

Alloy steel (Alloy 20, Alloy625/825/800)

Tube sheet fabrication video

Video demonstrate the fabrication and processes on tube sheet fabrication

Tube Sheet|Tubesheet