Naval ship recuperator heat exchanger failure
Appears in 1 lecture.
Appearances across the corpus
$100 million Navy program (early 1990s), Rolls-Royce-built room-sized brazed stainless steel heat exchanger for preheating destroyer/frigate combustion air. Designed for 100,000 hours; failed in two minutes. Cause: 2D finite element model assumed symmetric gas flow; asymmetric heating snapped six-inch hardened-steel tie bars. Tom served on the post-mortem team. Teaching point: "wishful thinking is not good engineering."