“Zero Fouling” Self-Cleaning Heat Exchanger

Abstract

Conventional shell and tube heat exchangers sometimes have to use two severely fouling process streams, one in the tubes and one in the shell. This paper presents the design of a self-cleaning heat exchanger that applies the self-cleaning mechanism in the tubes of two parallel bundles handling the fouling process streams. For the transfer of heat between both bundles, a small circulating flow of conditioned water is used as an intermediate fluid, a fraction of which evaporates on the outside of the tubes of the high-temperature bundle and condenses on the outside of the tubes of the low-temperature bundle. This novel design, which consists of two parallel bundles in one shell, experiences very high film coefficients at the outside surface of both tube bundles and does not suffer from any fouling. Therefore, it is referred to as a “zero fouling” self-cleaning heat exchanger. In this paper, a conventional severely fouling crude oil preheater will be compared with a zero fouling self-cleaning heat exchanger for the same service.