Fouling phenomenon and its effect on heat exchanger: A review

Heat exchangers as a heat transfer device has gained wide applications across different levels of domestic and industrial set-ups. Various studies have been carried out to study, analyse and predict its performance. However, one major phenomenon that limits heat exchanger performance is attributed to fouling. Based on this, various studies and approaches have focused on reduction, elimination and mitigation of fouling. This study therefore focused on this. It reviewed several attempts that have been carried out to understand and mitigate the incidents of fouling in heat exchangers. The study found that despite the existing models developed towards understanding fouling, there is no single model that has provided an accurate prediction of fouling in all the different types of heat exchangers. Also, majority of existing results have limited applications and some of the solutions are only peculiar to particular type of heat exchanger. Further to this, majority of the study results only pointed to small scale laboratory test schemes and there is absence of in-situ measurements that predicts actual (real life) service performance. © 2017, Global Digital Central. All rights reserved.