The fouling of heat exchangers, reactors and catalysts remains one of the most urgent problems facing the process industries. Over the past ten years there has been limited research and investigation into the underlying mechanisms which give rise to this problem. For convenience, particularly in heat exchanger technology, the mechanisms involved have been subdivided into different subject areas. It is often the situation that individuals or groups of workers have concentra- ted efforts in one or two of these specialist areas and there is a need to integrate the ideas across the whole spectrum...