Self‐Cleaning Surfaces for Heat Recovery During Industrial Hydrocarbon‐Rich Gas Cooling: An Experimental and Numerical Study

Abstract

The cooling of hydrocarbon-rich gases in industrial processes often leads to severe fouling, which impedes heat recovery, restricts operative conditions, and increases maintenance costs. The present work investigates whether self-cleaning surfaces represent a possible solution to overcome this technological bottleneck. Hydrophilic and hydrophobic treatments of compact heat exchanger plates are experimentally and numerically investigated during cooling of syngas produced from biomass gasification. The experimental evidences related to the operation of heat exchanger plates are assessed first, and a deeper insight into the relevant phenomena is thereafter obtained by performing numerical simulations. Our analysis identifies the hydrophobic treatment as the most promising solution and unveils the induced self-cleaning mechanism: the formation of small-sized and movable condensed droplets that enhance the collection and removal of gas impurities. These findings open up new routes toward the development of cheaper, more efficient, and sustainable gas cooling systems.Insets: two-times structure functions over statistical length, r, which identify for r < d the specific droplets surface area, S s . [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

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“…From a design perspective we show the results of the six cases in this study in terms of the infiltration rate in Figure 10 and offer some insight into how these results can be applied in practice. This rate is quantified by α which is the exponent of the power law given in (20), at intermediate times. α can be considered as a measure of the ability of the microstructure to detain the infiltrating rainfall, with higher values corresponding to more rapid infiltration and shorter detention time.…”

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