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Conflict of Interest: In relation to this article, we declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Publication history: Received April 18, 2009
Accepted June 24, 2009

This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Prediction of thickness and fouling rate in pulsating flow heat exchangers, using FLUENT simulator

Nasser Saghatoleslami^† Mehdi Koolivand Salooki Mohammad Ali Armin¹

Department of Chemical Engineering, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran ¹Department of Chemical Engineering, Shahrood Azad University, Shahrood, Iran

slami@um.ac.ir

Korean Journal of Chemical Engineering, January 2010, 27(1), 96-103(8), 10.1007/s11814-009-0315-3

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Abstract

Heat exchangers are an important part of industrial processes as they handle a major portion of total energy consumption. Fouling could have serious impact on their performance and hence affect the economic performance of the process plant. The aim of this work was to simulate the crystallization fouling process in a heat exchanger by developing a C++ program and adopting UDF functions through Fluent software; and hence evaluate all the given models and consequently implement the model which would best suit our particular case. The finding of this work would enable us to evaluate the thickness and fouling rate in the heat exchangers. Furthermore, the effect of pulsating flow on the crystallization fouling of calcium sulfate (CaSO4) in the heat exchanger was also investigated, and the effect of operation of different amplitude of the oscillations (10-70) and frequencies (1.59-12.73 Hz) on the fouling of this compound was_x000D_ studied.

Keywords

Fouling Heat Exchanger Pulsating Flow Fouling Resistance Calcium Sulfate

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