Abstract
Flexible plastic heat exchangers (FPHE) are heat exchangers based on flexible plastic capillaries. The diameters of the capillaries are 0.3 – 1.0 mm. Medical applications of FPHE are the only area where such heat exchangers have a long tradition and therefore extensive experience, blood cooling. However, such experience has practically no relevance for chemical engineering. Moreover the blood cooling is nearly always integrated with the blood oxidation which makes the FPHE application even more specific. Chemical engineering applications, e.g. crystallization, low cost low temperature cooling, are therefore not well known.
Fouling itself is multidimensional, interdisciplinary, vague, inconsistent, partially subjective and sparse. Therefore sever information shortage exists and even very uncertain knowledge is valuable. This is the reason why highly subjective information items as e.g. experience must be taken into consideration and models must be based on them.
A team of experts is probably the most important source of fouling knowledge. Biofouling was chosen as an important sub problem. Artificial intelligence has developed several formal tools to deal with different networks of such knowledge items. A multidimensional fuzzy model of FPHE fouling is described in details. There are nearly 300 simple fuzzy conditional statements.
