CFD modeling for prediction of particulate fouling of heat transfer surface in turbulent flow

•An integrated Eulerian model for fouling in turbulent flow was developed to simulate the particulate fouling characteristics.•The model comprises a deposition process and removal process and considers various factors affecting the particle deposition.•The important parameters are calculated and extracted by the User-defined function (UDF) code.•The model was applied to predict particulate fouling on the heat transfer surface in two real cases.•The simulation results obtained from the model in the two cases agrees well with published experimental data. In this work, an integrated Eulerian model for fouling in turbulent flow was developed to simulate the particulate fouling characteristics. The model comprises a deposition process and removal process and considers various factors affecting the particle deposition, such as Brownian and eddy diffusion, gravity deposition, thermophoresis, and turbophoretic deposition. Several important parameters are calculated and extracted directly from the computational fluid dynamics model by the code, instead of relying on empirical formulas. The model was applied to predict particulate fouling in two experimental cases: particulate fouling on the surface of ventilation ducts and asphaltene fouling on the heat transfer surface in oil transport pipelines. The results show that the deposition rate obtained from the model in the two cases agree well with published experimental data. Furthermore, for the case of asphaltene fouling, at the early stage of fouling generation, the mass of asphaltene deposit on the surface also agrees well with the experimental results.