Design & CFD analysis of plate type heat exchanger for enhanced heat transfer rates in food processing plant.

In many food processing plants, heat exchangers are an important component of complicated engineering systems involving heat transfer processes. A plate heat exchanger (PHE) is a crucial component of any condensing or evaporating system. The heat transfer and pressure drop are the most significant parts of sizing and grading the performance of PHE among many other aspects to consider. The flow is particularly turbulent because of the complicated corrugated surface design. As a result, empirical correlations are used to build plate heat exchangers, which deviates from reality. The performance of plate heat exchangers might be harmed when flow medium does not disperse uniformly. This in turn affects the pressure drop and heat transfer effectiveness. PHE is now widely used in a variety of industries, including chemical, food, and pharmaceutical processing, as well as in refrigeration plants. In the current study, however, PHE used in a soft drink production plant model is taken for investigation. Soft drinks are treated with preservatives to kill the bacteria and preserve the fluid for longer number of days. This work highlights the CFD application for the design of existing soft drink treating PHE in an industry. The parameters such as temperature distribution, heat flow, pressure and velocity variations with geometry and fluid velocities are investigated in detail. It was observed that an industrial PHE with 4 heat exchange plates can contribute for hot fluid temperature drop upto 17K at a flow circulation velocity of 0.125 cm/s. This also resulted in cold fluid temperature rise upto 14K. Cooling of fluids upto 60K can be achieved by increasing the number of zig-zag plates employed in PHE. It is also observed that heat transfer effectiveness can be improved by 20-25% by replacing existing finned tube heat exchangers with PHE's which is proposed to the industry where investigation is carried out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]