Fouling Calculator

Fouling is the formation of unwanted material deposits on heat transfer surfaces during process heating and cooling.

It occurs in all industries and most heat exchanger designs, with impacts ranging from heat transfer degradation to flow resistance and pressure drops. By forming a kind of insulation on heat-transfer surfaces and reducing heat transfer, fouling undermines heat exchange efficiency.

Therefore, it is very significant point that fouling can be predictable and calculable.In these calculations, shell and tube heat exchanger is assumed.Basic Equation is given below to calculate fouling.

\[ \begin{align}\begin{aligned}Q= m \times Cp \times \Delta T\\Q= U \times A \times \Delta T_{lm}\end{aligned}\end{align} \]

There are lots of parameters that effected to fouling. Fouling depends on Pipe Length, Hot-Fluid’s and Cold-Fluid’s Inlet-Outlet Temperature ,Diameter,Flow rate, Fluid type,Pressure Drop.

After these process is done, data is created and this data is used for machine learning to predict fouling. Simulearn library and Fouling Calcultor is used.

1from TwinAPI import Simulearn
2from TwinAPI.EngineeringFunctions.Physics.HeatTransfer import FoulingCalculator

User can be use these parameters to predict fouling. User must be specifed interval by entering 2 parameter value. For instance;

 1Fouling=FoulingCalculator.ShellAndTube()
 2
 3Fouling.Length_Min=8
 4Fouling.Length_Max=20
 5Fouling.Thot_out_min=150
 6Fouling.Thot_out_max=200
 7Fouling.PressureDifferece_Min=11e4
 8Fouling.PressureDifferece_Max=14e4
 9Fouling.DiameterInner_Max=0.4
10Fouling.DiameterInner_Min=0.1
11Fouling.Thot_inlet_min=250
12Fouling.Thot_inlet_max=350
13Fouling.Tcold_inlet_min=10
14Fouling.Tcold_inlet_max=40
15Fouling.MassFlowHot_min=22
16Fouling.MassFlowHot_max=32
17Fouling.MassFlowCold_min=25
18Fouling.MassFlowCold_max=35
19Fouling.Coolant=Fluids.Water
20Fouling.HotFluid=Fluids.Oil
21Fouling.DataSize=1000

DataSize can be manipulated.After DataSize is specifed, ready to generate by using Simulearn.

 1DataSet=Fouling.GenerateData(SaveAs="SimuHeX")
 2
 3HX_Fouling=Simulearn.HeX(DataSet)
 4
 5HX_Fouling.shift_percentage=10
 6HX_Fouling.noise_percentage=3
 7HX_Fouling.selection=285
 8HX_Fouling.test_size=0.3
 9HX_Fouling.random_state=1
10
11HX_Fouling.Predict()