Pressure Vessels & Heat Transfer Consultants Ltd. — Calgary, Alberta

Canada's only freelance senior thermal designer.

Fifty-plus years designing the shell-and-tube exchangers, air coolers, and pressure vessels that keep refineries, upgraders, and gas plants running. When the datasheet is hard, it lands on Don Fleming's desk.

P.ENG — ALBERTA & ONTARIO ASME · HTRI SHELL CANADA INNOVATION AWARD

Send your datasheet — direct reply from the engineer, not a sales team.

Animated cutaway drawing of a shell-and-tube heat exchanger: hot fluid flows through the tube bundle while cold fluid weaves across segmental baffles on the shell side, in counter-current flow. PVHTC · CALGARY AB DWG E-100 · SHELL & TUBE EXCHANGER · NTS SHELL IN (COLD) SHELL OUT TUBE IN (HOT) TUBE OUT SHELL SEGMENTAL BAFFLE TUBE BUNDLE CHANNEL HEAD TUBESHEET

FIG. 1 — SHELL-AND-TUBE EXCHANGER, COUNTER-CURRENT FLOW. Hot process fluid (copper) passes through the tube bundle; cold fluid (blue) weaves across segmental baffles on the shell side. This is the equipment class PVHTC has designed for over fifty years — thermal and mechanical.

50+Years of experience
1989PVHTC founded, Calgary
15+Years failure-free · grid-support condenser
1/10thCost · all-welded pipe vs. hairpin
Why PVHTC

A track record you can check against the plants themselves.

High pressure

More breechlock projects than anyone in Canada

PVHTC has worked on more high-pressure breechlock heat exchanger projects than anyone else in the country.

Innovation

No-baffle grid-support design — 15+ years failure-free

A grid-support condenser designed by Don has run a vacuum service in a major chemical plant for over fifteen years without failure.

Cost engineering

All-welded pipe at ~1/10th the cost

An all-welded pipe design that costs roughly a tenth of conventional double-pipe or hairpin exchangers.

Market position

The majority of Western Canada's refinery S&T designs

Responsible for the majority of shell-and-tube exchanger designs in Western Canada refineries and upgraders.

Exchanger and vessel designs delivered on projects for
Syncrude Suncor Shell Esso Petro-Canada Husky BP Tesoro
through Canada's major EPC firms — and directly through PVHTC since 1989.

What we do

Full-scope thermal and mechanical design.

From HTRI thermal rating to ASME/TEMA mechanical design and finite element analysis — one engineer, end to end.

Thermal

Heat exchanger design & rating

Shell-and-tube, air-cooled, forced and natural draft — designed and rated on the full HTRI and HTFS suites.

Mechanical

Pressure vessels, towers & columns

Mechanical design to ASME and TEMA, pipe stress analysis, and finite element analysis for complex vessels.

Advisory

Review & troubleshooting

Third-party design review, and thermal troubleshooting when an exchanger in service isn't doing what its datasheet promised.

From the field

The hardware behind the drawings.

Large shell-and-tube heat exchanger with stacked separator drums on a lowboy trailer, en route to site
SHELL-AND-TUBE EXCHANGER EN ROUTE TO SITE — THE SCALE OF EQUIPMENT PVHTC DESIGNS.
Start the conversation

Have a difficult exchanger? Send the datasheet.

You'll get a direct reply from the engineer who'll do the work — not a sales team. Email preferred; all business handled electronically.