Shear enhancing fouling reduction in heat exchangers

Recently, several technologies have been introduced to mitigate heat exchanger fouling. These technologies could prevent/minimize both the shell and tube side fouling. Among such technologies are self-cleaning, helical baffles configuration, twisted tube, brush cleaning and ball cleaning. Self-cleaning and helical baffles configuration technologies were developed, used and evaluated for oil industry in Saudi Arabia and implemented in Saudi Aramco facilities. This paper presents the performance results in reducing fouling by introducing these fouling mitigation technologies. The results indicated that in the self-cleaning technology, the small particles charged with the crude provided scouring action and cleaned the tubes continuously. Furthermore, the heat exchanger efficiency has increased due to increasing the flow turbulence level. The helical baffle configuration when compared to the conventional segmental configurations, reduced the shell side fouling and enhanced heat transfer. New correlations that account for helical baffle and self-cleaning configurations are presented.