UNISUITE WEB debuts at Chillventa 2026: PHE and Shell & Tube heat exchanger design, in your browser
How many times a year does your company actually design a heat exchanger from scratch? For many engineering teams, the answer is: not often. A revamp, a tender, a special unit, a client asking for a feasibility check by Friday. Until now, there were two options for those occasions, and neither was entirely satisfying: commit to a five-figure, multi-year licence sized for continuous use, or outsource the calculation to a consultant — paying for time, waiting for a slot, and losing control of the design loop.
UNISUITE WEB: design, rating and selection, straight from the browser
With UNISUITE WEB, Unilab removes that trade-off. The platform brings together, in a single online environment, the same validated calculation engines used every day by heat exchanger manufacturers worldwide, delivered as a service: you open a browser, log in, and calculate. Nothing to install, no serial numbers to manage, no IT approval to request. You subscribe only for the period you actually need — from a couple of days for a single verification, to a full year of continuous availability — and when the project ends, so does the commitment. Your data and projects stay safe in your own private, encrypted, GDPR-compliant area, ready for whenever you need them again.
Two modules are already online: SHELL WEB for shell & tube heat exchangers, and PHE WEB for plate heat exchangers. More modules coming gradually.
SHELL WEB: shell & tube, in 12 calculation modes
SHELL WEB covers the full workflow for shell & tube heat exchangers — design from scratch, rating and selection — across 12 calculation modes: fluid-fluid, condensation inside tubes, condensation outside tubes, evaporation inside tubes, flooded evaporator, spray (falling film) evaporator, steam inside tubes, steam outside tubes, cascade evaporating shell side/condensing tube side, cascade condensing shell side/evaporating tube side, and the vaporizer mode, inside or outside the tubes.
The module offers five different ways to reach a result. Free calculation puts the whole exchanger in your hands — geometry, tubes, baffles, duty. Automatic design only needs the required capacity, the pressure-drop limits and the thermal conditions: the software then generates several high-efficiency solutions, one at a time, each closer to zero oversurfacing. Calculation with tube sheet builds the unit around a tube sheet loaded from your archive — or one the engine selects — and fills in whatever is left open, while Verify heat exchanger takes an existing complete heat exchanger from the archive and checks what it delivers under the specified operating conditions. Selection, finally, runs every tube sheet — or every complete heat exchanger — in your archive, varying the remaining parameters to build the best possible unit, and returns a ranked list with the best solution first.
Among its more technical features is a Unilab exclusive: the extendable tube archive accepts one-start corrugated tubes — alongside the existing low-finned tubes — with no corrective factor applied, the result of months of dedicated research and particularly valuable for steam, fluid-fluid and food & beverage applications. Every calculation can be exported as a full report with TEMA printout, a tubesheet drawing downloadable in DWG format, and a 3D model of the exchanger in GLB, STEP or STL.
PHE WEB: gasketed and brazed plate heat exchangers
PHE WEB brings online the design, rating and selection of gasketed and brazed plate heat exchangers, across four calculation modalities: fluid-fluid, steam, direct expansion and condensing. As in SHELL WEB, the workflow follows a Verify / Design / Selection logic: Verify checks the performance of a known exchanger — plate, gasket and frame materials, geometry, connections, number of plates and passes — against the requested thermal duty; Design instead treats the number of plates as the unknown, calculating how many are needed to meet a target capacity within the desired oversize, and proposing the closest achievable configuration when the exact target can’t be met; Selection extends the same logic across every compatible plate and series in the archive, filtered by the user’s oversize and pressure-drop tolerance, and returns a ranked list of solutions.
One of the most significant additions is the new Custom Factors system, based on the Dittus-Boelter equations: it lets you adjust the coefficients c, y and x, plus the reference Reynolds thresholds for laminar and turbulent regimes, directly — modelling unconventional patterns such as dimple plates, multiple chevron angles or “multiflex” configurations well beyond the classic herringbone angle, while the software automatically determines the applicable flow regime. PHE WEB also lets users build and calibrate their own plate archive, and control Plate Disposition across mixed-angle packs — setting the percentage of high- and low-theta plates and visualising how they are arranged along the pack (at the beginning, at the end, or staggered). For advanced users, it’s a concrete way to align the model with their own experimental or laboratory data.
Both modules share the same technical foundation: the NIST REFPROP library, with thermodynamic and thermophysical properties for over 300 fluids and refrigerants plus 12 fluid mixtures, an extensive archive of oils, and more than 200 liquid foods, beverages and non-Newtonian fluids — all of it expandable with the user’s own fluids and mixtures — plus Neo, Unilab’s AI agent for thermal engineering, built directly into the web tools and available around the clock, by voice or text, to answer thermodynamics questions, interpret screenshots of the software or guide users to the right tool.
Meet us at Chillventa 2026, Nuremberg
Chillventa 2026 — taking place from October 13 to 15, 2026 in Nuremberg, Germany – all of this at the Unilab stand Hall 4, Stand 4-116. The Unilab team will be on hand for live demos of SHELL WEB and PHE WEB, to answer technical questions and gather feedback from the people who design heat exchangers every day.
Chillventa 2026 | October 13–15 | Nuremberg, Germany | Hall 4, Booth 4-116
Those who won’t be able to attend the trade fair can still start exploring information about UNISUITE WEB at unisuiteweb.eu.
For more information, please contact sales@unilab.eu.
