I want to input steam in one side and blowing air into the other side. The objective is condensate steam with air using a plate heat exchanger instead of an air cooled condenser. Any advice?
Sure, a plate heat exchanger can be used as a condenser. But they are not often picked for this service because they do not have as high a volume to surface area ratio as a tube-in-shell heat exchanger. Plus, if your plate HX is run at a vacuum, you have to aware of dP across the plates and account for the structural impact of potential bowing and add the needed supports. Finally, you have to be aware of how to handle the condensate, once you condense water it effectively limits access of steam to the heat transfer surfaces, the space between plates has less volume to allow condensate to drain and also less volume for steam lanes to allow it to get access to the cool surfaces.
A plate type exchanger is not the most economical way to condense steam with air. A conventional finned tube air cooler will work much better in terms of initial cost and operating costs. If a plate exchanger were better, it would be used for refrigerant condensers on all HVAC units. Plate exchangers have a tendency to become fouled because of their small passages. You would really need a high quality air filter on your cooling air. I see absolutely no advantage to using a plate exchanger in this application.
A finned, air-cooled condensor (ex- like a car radiator) has lots of surface area for air contact for several reasons, especially since the heat transfer (measured by Uo= heat transfer coefficient) is sorta low and any dirt/ fouling of surface makes rate even slower. In your case, for a typical plate frame heat exchanger, it would seem that your air flow rate would need to be quite large.
