I am trying to determine the feasibility of using a heat exchanger to utilize waste heat from a natural gas burner to heat a large quantity of water. My facility has a nitride process that has three 500 gallon pre-wash baths and a nitride bath of molten salts. The baths have a set point temperature of 130F and the exhaust temperature of the nitride burner is 600F. I'm not sure how feasible this is because heat transfer was never my strong point. If someone could point me in the direction of a design or a company that specializes in this I would greatly appreciate it.

well 600F is hot enough to heat water.

 

the feasibility will depend on how much water you need to heat(and to what temperature) as well as how much nitride your burning (the power of the flame).

 

If you give us some more info we could definitely do the back of the envelope calculations to determine feasibility

I have a pre-wash and post-rinse bath baths that are 1000 gallons each. They each have a target setpoint of 170°F, although I believe they actually run around 130°F. The temperature of the exhaust gases on the nitride bath burner is 600°F. The burner for the nitride bath is set at 223,000 BTU/hr. I also have two other heat sources available. One is a pre-heat oven with a 250,000 BTU/hr burner and the other is a liquid salt bath station with a 250,000 BTU/hr burner. I do not have the exhaust temperatures off these burners, as we are not running production on the weekends. I will be able to get them on Monday.