| To improve our understanding of heat exchanger fouling, the deposition of colloidal magnetite particles (Fe3O4) was experimentally studied under various conditions of heat transfer.;In the present work, fouling is described and a general model is used to simulate fouling under non-boiling heat transfer conditions and to compare the results to experimental values. A commercial fluid-dynamic software package called Fluent, utilizing k-epsilon turbulence models, was used to compute the thermalhydraulic properties of the fluid inside the column.;It was assumed that convection and diffusion ruled the transport of magnetite since the particles considered are of micrometre size. The deposition was simulated using an Eulerian model based on the convection-diffusion equation, including turbulent and Brownian diffusion. A Lagrangian model, based on the resolution of the equation of momentum for a particle, was also used to characterize better the relative importance of thermophoresis, lift and Brownian motion on the transport of particles. (Abstract shortened by UMI.). |
