Abstract

This paper addresses monitoring problems commonly encountered in petrochemical enterprises caused by fouling and clogging in the circulating water heat exchangers by monitoring the heat exchanger’s wall vibration signal for early failure detection. Due to the difficulties encountered in simulation caused by the large number of tubes inside the heat exchanger, such methods were discussed by studying in the fluid-conveying pipeline fouling. ANSYS was used to establish the normal model and fouling model of a fluid-conveying pipeline so as to analyze the changing rule of various parameters that are influenced by different inlet velocities. As the inlet velocity and fouling severity continuously increased, the wall load and the vibration acceleration increased as well, leading variations in wall vibration signals. This paper conduct extensive experiments by using straight pipes to compare the results from simulation and from normal fluid-conveying pipelines, under the same working conditions. By such comparison, we estimate the accuracy of the simulation model.