The effect of heat transfer characteristics of macromolecule fouling on heat exchanger surface: A dynamic simulation study

Abstract At the city gate gas pressure reduction stations (CGSs), to prevent natural gas from forming a hydrate in the throttle valve, the natural gas is heated by the heater before reaching the pressure relief valve. Heat exchangers are an essential component of industrial processes that contribute significantly to total system energy. Since the element impacting heat exchanger performance is the fouling process, all fouling processes and models were dynamically simulated in this study. Through coding in the C++ language and simultaneous use of fluent functions, or, in other words, user‐defined function (UDF), fouling‐related models were defined for this software. The dynamic simulation was performed, and parameters such as fouling strength and layer thickness were calculated. The effects of changing operating conditions, such as gas inlet velocity, surface temperature, and fouling species concentration on fouling growth, were also evaluated. As the concentration of fouling species increased, the fouling rate also increased. The amount of supersaturation and fouling rate increased as the surface temperature increased. Due to the operational limitations of the system, to reduce the fouling rate, the gas inlet velocity should be as high as possible, and the fluid inlet temperature, surface temperature, and concentration of fouling species should be as low as possible. In this study, the required time to reach the efficiency of 70% of the heat exchanger was calculated using the modelling of this chamber, which was equivalent to 190 days. Additionally, the critical thickness of the fouling layer at this time was 3.5 cm.