SAMARA
The challenge
The formation of deposits on heat- and/or material-transferring surfaces, known as fouling, is still an unsolved problem in practically all areas of the process industry and energy technology. Examples are
- the formation of deposits in chemical polymerization processes, such as in acrylate production,
- biological cooling water fouling due to the increased biological quality of rivers,
- the formation of deposits on heaters during the thermal treatment of milk,
- sooting of exhaust gas recoolers in motor vehicles,
- the formation of deposits on membranes during the concentration of fruit juices or the dewatering of salt solutions, known as scaling,
- Deposits in waste heat exchangers in power plants,
- fouling in the preheat trains of refineries, etc.
The material diversity of fouling-prone systems and the large number of influencing factors make it seem hopeless to develop anti-fouling measures for all relevant systems across all material systems. At the same time, a wealth of different potential antifouling measures are known or are constantly being developed, such as adhesion-reducing coatings, whose effectiveness and efficiency cannot be evaluated in a practically comparable and referenceable manner. Even the reproduction of fouling tests reported in the literature (reproducibility) is often not possible. This poses a dilemma for operators of fouling-prone production processes. They have no basis for a rational and targeted selection of fouling-reducing measures.
Goals
The joint project therefore aims to develop, construct, operate and qualify standard equipment for the quantitative evaluation of the fouling tendency of components and complete equipment systems under defined and reproducible conditions. This is supplemented by the definition of a uniform methodology for the operation of the equipment, the acquisition of the experimental raw data and their compression into characteristic measures. The standardization and referenceability of procedures and methods often proves to be conducive to innovation: new components, surface modifications, equipment or operating methods can be evaluated under defined conditions against the state of the art and thus qualitatively and quantitatively prove their advantage over it. The central elements of this methodology are
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