Fouling temperature effect

Many exhaust streams are hot, so materials must be able to woik at elevated temperatures (see Table 6.7), and the gases are often chemically aggressive with sulphur dioxide and nitric acid, fluorine, chlorine and other components making the process difficult, altering the dew point conditions, and reducing the life of the filter medium. Reactions can occur between the carrier gas, the dust and the filter medium, and these are usually intensified by temperature effects. The temperature can rarely be reduced by heat exchange, since the heat exchangers rapidly foul up with dust deposits. 

Second, most membrane materials adsorb proteins. Worse, the adsorption is membrane-material specific and is dependent on concentration, pH, ionic strength, temperature, and so on. Adsorption has two consequences it changes the membrane pore size because solutes are adsorbed near and in membrane pores and it removes protein from the permeate by adsorption in addition to that removed by sieving. Porter (op. cit., p. 160) gives an illustrative table for adsorption of Cytochrome C on materials used for UF membranes, with values ranging from 1 to 25 percent. Because of the adsorption effects, membranes are characterized only when clean. Fouling has a dramatic effect on membrane retention, as is explained in its own section below. 

The fouling of the probe when inserted into a duct or pipe acts as an isolating layer and increases the measurement error. To avoid this conduction error, the probe should be a poor heat conductor. In measuring surface temperatures, the probe should not have an insulating effect, as this will change the temperature in the measuring point. 

Random and structured packings are susceptible to surface fouling due to process conditions and/or the presence of oxygen as may be related to bacterial growth. Some systems will precipitate solids or crystals from solution usually due to the temperature and concentration effects. Bravo [135] discusses air-water stripping and illus-... 

By substituting the appropriate values for viscosity and diffusion at various temperatures, they found that corrosion rates could be calculated which were confirmed by experiment. The corrosion rates represent maxima, and in real systems, corrosion products, scale and fouling would reduce these values often by 50%. The equation was useful in predicting the worst effects of changing the flow and temperature. The method assumes that the corrosion rate is the same as the limiting diffusion of oxygen at least initially this seems correct. 

From an examination of Equation 8.1, it can be seen that several things can be done to improve the heat-transfer rate. Quite often the simplest approach is to increase the temperature differential, by using higher-pressure steam or a hot oil supply. In some cases this may have adverse effects, for example a very hot wall temperature may lead to fouling, or, worse, initiate unwanted reactions. This is likely to be more pronounced in cases where mass transfer is poor. In some instances this practice may... 

Several different companies have greened various steps of the process. In VNB production by-products come from competing Diels-Alder reactions and polymerization, largely of cyclopentadiene. The reaction is usually carried out in a continuous tube reactor, but this results in fouling, due to polymerization, at the front end, where the dicyclopentadiene is cracked to cyclopentadiene at temperatures over 175 °C. Whilst fouling does not have a very significant effect on yield, over time it builds up. 

In addition to the use of antifouling chemical agents to mitigate the effect of fouling on the tube-side, twisted tubes can be used rather than plain tubes. These have surface irregularities. Plain tubes can also be fitted on the inside with tube inserts. Twisted tubes and tube inserts promote additional turbulence and pressure drop and reduce the surface temperature of the tube to mitigate fouling. Tube inserts will be dealt with in more detail later. 

In the worse case, where either sample temperature, pressure or reactor integrity issues make it impossible to do otherwise, it may be necessary to consider a direct in situ fiber-optic transmission or diffuse reflectance probe. However, this should be considered the position of last resort. Probe retraction devices are expensive, and an in situ probe is both vulnerable to fouling and allows for no effective sample temperature control. Having said that, the process chemical applications that normally require this configuration often have rather simple chemometric modeling development requirements, and the configuration has been used with success. 

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