In most heating systems, one of the factors that increase energy consumption and reduce the efficiency of heat exchangers are foulings, settling of dissolved or suspended solids in a fluid is called fouling. Foulings are placed in layers on the heat transfer surfaces and they reduce the efficiency of the heat exchanger and increase energy consumption. For this reason, descaling is very important. In order to ensure the exact time of descaling, accurate information about the amount of fouling in the heat exchanger must be available. In this research, the goal is estimation of the fouling profile in a pipe with the presence of turbulent flow using the inverse heat transfer method (IHTM). For this purpose, the conjugate gradient method with adjoint problem (CGMwAP) is used to identify the fouling profile. The model used for a tube heat exchanger, the working fluid is pure water and the precipitating solution is calcium sulfate. This research was done through OpenFoam software. The results of the research showed that the optimal conditions for the analysis of inverse heat transfer using the CGMwAP is using the turbulence model k–ω SST, standard deviation of the temperature 0.0005 and 8 temperature sensors. In this research, the results showed that this method estimates the fouling profile well in the turbulent flow with Reynolds number 5000, 7000 and 9000. Also, the results showed that this algorithm can estimate sinusoidal, zigzag and uniform fouling profiles well.
Azizi et al. (Wed,) studied this question.