Fouling causes serious maintenance problems on heat exchanger tubes and process facilities. To avoid such fouling problems, numerous efforts have been tried, e.g., diagnosis of fouling, reducing and eliminating the fouling, etc.. The objective of the present study is to develop an innovative diagnostic system of fouling, which can detect the scaling attached to the wall non-homogeneously.
On the development for the fouling diagnostic technology, we have used a new method which is changed multi-measuring points from a single-measuring point with U-coefficient. The performance of the diagnostic system has been evaluated with a scaling simulator that generates scaling on the tested tube wall. The measured values with the diagnostic system were compared with the amounts of the scaling generated by the simulator. In addition to, we performed a field test for a reliable qualification of the diagnostic technology and verified a good performance and a stability of the diagnostic system.
The main conclusion is, that the proposed technology can feature great performance under worst operating conditions, easy maintenance and supervision, fast exploitation, and affordable cost.