Impact of Fouling on Flow-Induced Vibration Characteristics in Fluid-Conveying Pipelines

This paper has addressed the common monitoring problems in petrochemical companies, which are caused by fouling and clogging in the circulating water heat exchangers, and has introduced techniques to monitor the heat exchanger's wall vibrations for early failure detection. Due to the difficulties encountered in simulation caused by the large number of tubes inside the heat exchanger, such monitoring methods are discussed by studying the fouling of a fluid-conveying pipeline. ANSYS was used to establish the normal and fouling models of a fluid-conveying pipeline so as to analyze the changing rules of various parameters that are influenced by different inlet velocities. These parameters include flow velocity, direction, pipeline wall load, wall displacement, and the acceleration of fluid domain in a fluid-conveying pipeline. It is shown that, as the inlet velocity and fouling severity continuously increase, the wall load and the vibration acceleration increase as well, leading variations in wall vibration signals. This paper conducts extensive experiments by using straight pipes to compare the results from simulation with those from the normal fluid-conveying pipelines under the same working conditions. By such comparison, the efficacy of the simulation model has been demonstrated.