For most engineering graduates, the severely fouled equipment shown on the cover page of this issue of Heat Transfer Engineering bears no relation whatsoever to what they have learned in their undergraduate courses on heat transfer and heat exchanger design. Nevertheless, this is reality! As reported in a survey [1] and shown in Fig. 1, the majority of industrial heat exchangers suffer from deposition problems and must be designed with some allowance for the resulting reduction in thermal and hydraulic performance. To date, the formation of deposits on heat transfer surfaces is the least understood problem in the design of heat exchangers.
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