CFD simulation of crude oil fouling from laboratory- to industrial-scale heat exchangers using a weak coupling approach

Abstract

Crude oil fouling is described as an accumulation of unwanted materials such as asphaltene and metallic salt on a heat transfer surface in a pre-heat train of the crude distillation unit in oil refineries, causing an economic loss of 1–1.2 billion U.S. dollars per year in 2019. Computational fluid dynamics is one of the useful simulation tools for numerical research on this topic. However, crude oil fouling is a long-term phenomenon; therefore, the time scale is longer than general computational fluid dynamics problems. The fouling layer in oil refineries grows over several months to several years despite the small pipe diameter of several or several tens of millimetres. For this reason, it is not easy to satisfy the Courant–Friedrichs–Lewy condition. To overcome this problem, we developed a new algorithm based on a weak coupling approach, validated this scheme, and exhibited the application of this technology. In the new algorithm, momentum and pressure fields and enthalpy and mass fraction fields are solved separately. The algorithm was implemented as FoulingFOAM, a crude oil fouling simulator based on OpenFOAM v2006. Then, the solver was first validated with the lab-scale measurements, showing good agreement with the experimental data. Next, industrial-scale data in the two refineries were simulated for validation. It was possible to predict the peak fouling resistance against time. Finally, for both lab- and industrial-scale simulations, the predictions of our numerical tool showed that fouling resistance increased with higher wall temperature, lower crude oil velocity, and higher concentration of fouling species, which were identical to previous measurements. Hence, we concluded that the weak coupling approach is promising for investigating crude oil fouling problems.