Pressure drop in dairy evaporators: Experimental study and friction factor modelling
Journal article, 2017

The pressure drop that occurs during the falling film evaporation of dairy products is related to the downward co-flowing vapour and directly affects the saturation temperature of the product, resulting in a non-constant thermal driving force of the process along the evaporator. Frictional forces are the major contributor to the pressure drop, and the friction factor is a crucial parameter in reliably estimating the pressure drop. In the present study, the absolute vapour flow pressure losses during falling film evaporation of dairy products were measured using an experimental internal tube evaporator set-up. To simulate real industrial conditions, experiments were conducted by varying the co-flow inlet velocity (from 0 to 37 ms(-1)) over a wide range of product dry solid content DC (from DC = 0%-50%). Results obtained at DC = 0% show that the experimental approach is consistent when measurements are compared to the well-known Wallis correlation. A large number of experimental data has been obtained for DC between 13 and 40% for which the pressure losses have a strong dependence from the co-flowing vapour rate; in some specific cases, the influence of the surface bubbling phenomena has been put in evidence. The presented results, have been used to calibrate a new accurate correlation for the friction factor (4f(tv)) coefficient showing a squared residual of R-2 = 0.93.

international journal of heat and mass transfer

1973

Annular two-phase flow

Falling film

falling-film evaporation

v16

annular-flow

Food Science & Technology

isholm d

Vapour pressure losses

Engineering

p347

heat-transfer

Drying process

Author

Ernesto Mura

Chalmers, Energy and Environment, Industrial Energy Systems and Technologies

Mathias Gourdon

Chalmers, Energy and Environment, Industrial Energy Systems and Technologies

Journal of Food Engineering

0260-8774 (ISSN)

Vol. 195 128-136

Driving Forces

Sustainable development

Subject Categories

Energy Engineering

Food Engineering

DOI

10.1016/j.jfoodeng.2016.09.020

More information

Created

10/7/2017