Avaliação teórica do desempenho de um trocador de calor a placas empregado em um processo de uma indústria alimentícia

Abstract

Heat exchangers are fundamental in industrial processes, and the plate heat exchanger, developed in the 19th century for implementation in the brewing industry, has been widely used in the food, chemical and pharmaceutical industries ever since due to its ability to operate without compromising the final product. The use of a poorly sized heat exchanger results in high and non-optimized operating costs. In this work, a theoretical evaluation of a plate heat exchanger implemented in a food industry located in northern Paraná, which uses it in part of its stratified beverage manufacturing process, is carried out. This study will allow evaluating the performance of the heat exchanger from a thermal and fluid dynamic point of view, allowing to quantify the thermal effectiveness of the equipment and the loss of load provided to the flow inside it. Finally, a study on the possible optimization of heat and mass transfer within the heat exchanger is carried out, evaluating the influence of variations in geometric parameters intrinsic to the constructive components of the equipment on the value of thermal effectiveness and loss of load. With the alteration of the constructive parameters of the plates, such as the effective width of thermal exchange, it is possible to achieve a gain of 4% in thermal effectiveness and a reduction of 55% in pressure loss and consequently in pumping power, which are extremely important optimizations.