Design and Implementation of a Self-Cleaning Heat Exchanger Using a Digital Twin

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.