City Research Online

Abstract

Fouling can be reduced by careful design or surface treatment; however, regular manual cleaning is often still required. In this study, a self-cleaning heat exchanger system to automatically identify and remove fouling was designed. The Self-cleaning system was designed to operate automatically without human input and use a backwash of water through the heat exchanger tubes to clean them. A digital twin (DT) is utilised with a model of the performance of the heat exchanger; this is the first known research where a DT is used to control a self-cleaning (or self-engineering) response. The steps used to develop the DT are described, and the logic used to determine when to trigger self-cleaning. Temperature readings are compared to the DT model to determine when heat transfer is impeded by fouling. Tests performed with fouling added successful demonstrated the DT and self-cleaning. The effectiveness of the heat exchanger before fouling, with fouling and after cleaning was used to determine the effectiveness of the self-cleaning. The original performance returned by cleaning varied with 15%, 81% and 52% returned in each experiment.

Publication Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Additional Information:	Copyright the authors, 2021.
Publisher Keywords:	Self-engineering; digital twin; self-cleaning; through-life engineering services
Subjects:	T Technology > TJ Mechanical engineering and machinery
Departments:	School of Science & Technology School of Science & Technology > Engineering

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