Regenerative Heat Exchanger

A regenerative heat exchanger, or regenerator, transfers heat between two fluid streams indirectly by storing heat from the hot fluid in a thermal storage medium and then releasing it to the cold fluid as the streams alternate across that medium. The technology dates to the hot blast process used on blast furnaces during industrialization and later spread to glass melting and steel production, and it remains in use today in high-pressure boiler systems and air preheating for power plants. Its main advantage is compactness: a regenerator matrix can pack as much as 1,000 square feet of heat-transfer surface into a single cubic foot, versus roughly 30 square feet for a conventional shell-and-tube exchanger of the same volume. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/