Soft Computing for Industrial Heat Exchanger

Heat Exchangers (HX) are used in most of the industries like thermal power plant, refineries and food processing industries. There are several types of heat exchangers available, mostly Shell and Tube type Heat Exchanger (STHX) is preferred widely, due to its robustness and more efficient during transient condition. The efficiency of HX is reduced due to deposition of extraneous material upon the heat transfer surface, called fouling, which introduces resistance to heat transfer. This deposition reduces lifetime of the HX. Measurement of fouling factor in real time operation is a tedious task. In this paper, state and parameter estimation is carried out to estimate oil/water outlet temperature and Overall Heat Transfer Coefficient (OHTC) is estimated using random walk model approach with Ensemble Kalman Filter (EKF) and Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF). The simulation results show the effectiveness and reliability of both the filters.