Heat Exchanger Manufacturing: Plates to ABB Robots

Heat exchanger manufacturing sits behind a surprising share of daily life: the milk you drink, the hot water in a flat with a combi boiler, the heat pump outside a house. On 14 September 2026 Mitsubishi Electric announced a new plate heat exchanger for heat pumps, which brings the product back into the news. This post follows how plate exchangers were made, from Richard Seligman's gasketed plates of 1923 to brazed units, then looks at where robots weld, stack and inspect them and where ABB's arms could fit.

Two brazed plate heat exchangers in a building's heating plant, one at each side of the pipework. Photo: InterCity(IC) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From Seligman's gasketed plates to brazed units

Richard Seligman founded APV in 1910 as the Aluminium Plant and Vessel Company, a specialist firm that supplied welded vessels to brewers and vegetable oil makers. In 1923 the company produced what it calls the world's first commercially successful plate heat exchanger. Early plates were cast in gunmetal and clamped inside a frame, rather like a filter press, and thin pressed stainless steel plates followed in the early 1930s. One big customer was the dairy industry, where the design helped make high-temperature short-time pasteurisation the standard.

APV milk pasteurisation and cooling equipment at Peters Ltd in Brisbane, November 1955. Photo: Queensland State Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A gasketed plate exchanger is a stack of pressed, corrugated plates, each with a rubber gasket around its edge, squeezed between two frame plates. Hot and cold fluids flow in alternate gaps, and the corrugations make the flow turbulent so heat passes quickly. Because the gaskets can be opened, the unit can be cleaned and extended with more plates. That made the design popular in food plants. Fitting gaskets, hanging plates on the frame and tightening the bolts is hands-on work, so a large unit takes a lot of careful assembly.

A single gasketed plate hanging in the frame of a dismantled plate heat exchanger. Photo: RomanM82 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Smaller units went a different way. Instead of gaskets, a brazed plate heat exchanger joins the plates with filler metal in a furnace, forming a joint at every point where plates touch. SWEP, one maker, says it has produced brazed plate exchangers since 1983 and reports more than 3.5 million sold in 2023. These sealed units are small enough for domestic hot water, and Wikipedia notes that brazed versions sit in the hot-water sections of millions of combination boilers. Older patents describe the assembly as manual, with plates stacked by hand into a fixture before brazing.

Stacked corrugated metal sheets in the brazed core of a heat exchanger. Photo: Jerod00 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Where robots and ABB arms fit today

Mitsubishi Electric's announcement shows why the product keeps changing. The new heat exchanger puts micro-offset fins between flat plates, with distribution channels at the inlets and outlets so gas and liquid refrigerant spread evenly. The company says it delivers about three times the heat transfer of conventional grooved plate models and cuts the refrigerant charge to about one third. That matters because many next-generation refrigerants, such as R32, are flammable, so a smaller charge lowers the risk of a leak. A new design like this still has to be built in volume.

Inside a Mitsubishi Ecodan heat pump outdoor unit, with the compressor and its brazed copper pipework. Photo: PeterEastern / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Building one means pressing plates, stacking them in the right order and orientation, adding filler, and brazing or welding the pack. A US patent on laminated heat exchangers describes a robotic arm that picks up laminate members and moves them between stages, with a controller checking stack quality before the top plate is fixed and the stack is brazed. Equipment maker AP&T describes a plate line with a stacker that turns every other plate and delivers a complete package. SWEP says it began investing to expand and automate its sites in 2019.

Corrugated plates with gasket grooves laid out ready for assembly into a plate heat exchanger. Photo: termoprom.com.ua / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not publish a plate heat exchanger line that I could find, so these are possibilities, not customer projects. The arms are well suited to the work. An IRB 1200 or IRB 1300 can pick plates from a conveyor and stack them with repeatable placement, and a GoFa CRB 15000 can feed a station without a cage. For welding frames, nozzles and connections, an ABB arc welding robot on a positioner can turn the part under the torch. Cells like these are usually built and tested first in RobotStudio.

An ABB arc welding robot with a positioner that turns heavy parts. Photo: Ana 2016 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

What comes next for plates and the robots that stack them

The next years are likely to push exchangers toward more heat pumps, more compact designs and smaller refrigerant charges, which is exactly what Mitsubishi Electric targets. Each design change alters plate geometry, so stacking and welding cells need to handle variety without long reprogramming. Our post on heat pump manufacturing shows how ABB arms already work on the units that these exchangers sit inside. Offline programming and easy teaching tools such as Wizard can shorten the time to bring a new plate layout onto the line.

ABB's GoFa Cobot Arc Welding Package on a welding table. Photo: ABB

Welded plate exchangers and tube-and-shell units add another job: joining thin plates, tube sheets and nozzles with little distortion. Orbital welding systems already weld tubes into tube sheets, and the same repeatable path control is what a robot offers on larger fabrications. Thin plates need good fixtures and consistent torch control, and poor fit shows up as leaks that testing must catch. Leak tests and visual checks at the end of the line are tasks where robot arms and cameras can help, and one vendor brochure lists automated leak, function and visual inspection at the end of its stacker line.

A welding head and its control handle working on the tube sheet of a heat exchanger. Photo: POLYSOUDE / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

For homes, the news is about heat pumps and hot water. A smaller refrigerant charge could make flammable refrigerants easier to accept in houses, and better heat transfer could shrink a unit. For factories, the open problems are skilled welders, fixture cost and quality control. SafeMove lets people work near an arm when stacking needs a human hand. Our overview of ABB robot use cases shows the range of work arms already do. Whether plate stacking joins that list depends on production volumes and on how often plate designs change, and I found no ABB announcement on it.

A worker loads a fixture at a fenced robot cell in ABB's Baden battery plant. Photo: ABB

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