Mitigation of heat exchanger fouling in industry using catalytic materials

Abstract

Calcium sulphate is one of the major fouling that lead to serious operating problems in industries. The mitigation of calcium sulphate scaling by physical water treatment (PWT) in an operating heat exchanger using zinc and tourmaline as catalytic materials is presented in this paper. The PWT is defined as a non-chemical effective fouling retardation method which exhibits promising protection to protect the environment and maintain a green environment. Catalytic materials such as (zinc and tourmaline) are capable of tackling fouling problems. Experiments were conducted in this study to verify and evaluate the performance of the PWT method. Artificially hardened water at 300 mg L−1 was used as the cooling water for deposit analysis. The velocity of the cooling water (i.e. hard water) was varied from 0.3 to 0.8 m s−1 and the bulk temperature of the solution was maintained at 45°C. The experimental running time was set at 10 h each step. The artificially hardened water concentration was monitored under various velocities. Complex metric titration was implemented to measure the concentration of calcium sulphate every 2 h for cases with and without PWT-treated cooling water flow. The results showed that the reduction in calcium sulphate formation for case with PWT higher compared to those without PWT. However, it was observed that the performance of the PWT decreases gradually overtime, which needs to be addressed in future work.