Fleat Exchanger Fouling Mitigation By Biending and ultrasonic

Fouling is a major economic problem faced in petroleum industry. The presence of paraffin wax deposition causes ineffective heat transfer and cost increment, since it creates a new resistance to the heat flow. Many people keeps thinking and moving forward in their effort to reduce the fouling, which encourages them to focus on the mitigation and cleaning techniques. The objective of this study is to investigate the fouling characteristics of pure and mixed crude oil on heat exchanger surface. In addition, the study also investigated the effect of ultrasonic application for fouling mitigation. The specified parameters were varied in each set of experiment, followed by monitoring the rate of deposition for 3 hours. The experiments were mainly carried out using cold finger unit, cooling bath circulation system and ultrasonic bath unit. Besides, the effects of each run were observed by varying 3 different crude oil samples (TAPIS, MASSA and MIRI), wall temperatures, crude oil temperatures and ultrasonic application. Ultrasonic wave was generated at the lowest frequency (28kHz) and highest power (600W), since this condition is proved to give the highest mitigation. The result shows that the deposition increases as times increases. In addition, deposition favors at low crude oil and wall temperature, because it depends on the temperature differences and amount of crude oil temperature below the cloud point. Apart from that, it was found that the amount of deposition is directly dependant to the amount of paraffin wax in each sample. However, after introducing the blending options, deposition of higher paraffin wax content sample was lowered down because the wax content has been reduced. Finally, the combination of ultrasonic and blending was proved to give very high and effective reduction of deposition for all samples namely TAPIS-MASSA (50%), MASSA-MIRI (50%) and TAPIS-MIRI (60%). In short, crude oil blend and ultrasonic application were proved as an effective method of fouling mitigation.