For mosl engineering graduates, Ihe severely fouled equipment shown on the cover page oj" this issue of Hear Transfer Eiif-int'critJii bears no relalion whatsoever lo whal ihey have leumcd in their undergraduate courses on heat transfer and heat exchanger design. Nevertheless, this is reality! As reported in a survey 111 and shown in Fig. 1. the majority of industrial heat exchangers suffer from dept>sition problems and must be designed with some allowance for the resulting reduction in thermal and hydraulic performance. To d:ite. the formation of deposits on heat transfer surfaces is the least understood problem in the design of heat exchangers.Well-proven codes and correlations are now available for standard heat exchanger design, and computational lluid dynamics simulations can be perfonned for complex, single-pha.se flow conditions. However, all of tbese sophisticated calculations are offset by the current practice of adding constant, crudely estimated, experience-or imagination-based fouling resistances (less accurately icrmed fouling fariors). which may increase the heat transier surface calculated ft)r clean conditions by 20-200%. Even worse is the situation for the prediction of pressure drop. While more heat exchangers arc taken oul of operalion due to excessive, fouling-relaled increase in How restriction. there is virtually no infomialion about the potential effects of deposits on pressure drop. Considering the fact thai beat exchangers are ihe workhorse of mosl chemical, petrochemical.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.