Study On Anti-fouling Performance In The Chaotic Fins Channel

With the development of the society and economy, energy crisis has been one of difficult problems all over the world. Heat exchangers are universal equipments which are extensively used in many heavy-energy consuming industries such as petroleum, chemical industry, energy, power, metallurgy, aerospace, vehicle, refrigeration, grocery and so on. The investment of heat exchangers whose functions have a direct effect on economic benefit occupies the major proportion in the total investment in many kinds of thermodynamic systems. However, there are fouling problems of different degree in most heat exchangers. Because of fouling existing, the heat transmission performance of heat exchangers declines and the flowing resistance of fluid increases, which both lead to a series of economic loss finally. Therefore, the fouling problem in heat exchangers has been gradually paid attention to widely by investigators in various countries.Plate-fins heat exchanger, as a type of high performance heat exchanger, has many advantages such as compactness, legerity, high efficiency and so on.But due to having narrow channels, fouling has more severe influence than the conventional heat exchanger. In order to solve this problem, this paper investigates a chaotic fins channel which can produce chaotic advection, adopts a method combined by theoretic analysis, numerical simulation and experimentation research, and studies its fouling performance. The concept of Resident Time Distribution (RTD) studied in the reactor for mixing is introduced into the research of channel fouling study integrating mass transfer characteristic. The Peclet number's physical sence is also introduced. At the same time, it is pointed that Peclet number (Pe), as a significant symbol parameter which can scale convection mass transmission, measures the fouling effect in quantitative analysis, and indicates its advantage applying in anti-fouling.Numerical simulation method is performed for the flow property in the chaotic fins channel by applying FLUENT software. It is simulated that fluid flows and develops in the chaotic fins channel. It also considers Renault number, Prandtl number and geometry dimension as influence factors for fluid flowing and fouling in the chaotic fins channel. Besides, triangle channel is compared with the chaotic fins channel. As a result, the chaotic fins channel has preferable anti-fouling performance. According to the numerical simulation results, the dimensionless parameter formulas between Peclet number and channel geometry dimension are obtained, which play an important part in this type channel's anti-fouling performance during practical engineering.Finally, the paper also measures the anti-fouling performance of this channel through the experiments. It is validated that the experimental results is as consistent as the numerical simulation results basically. Meanwhile, it is demonstrated that adopting numerical simulation is proper and credible. In a short, this channel will have an extensive application and development prospect in anti-fouling in future.