Conjugate fluid flow and kinetics modeling for heat exchanger fouling simulation

Thermal treatment of fluid foods represents a major unit operation in the food industry, to ensure the product’s safety and quality features. But during the thermal treatments of such sensible fluids in common plate heat exchangers, food constituents such as proteins can be thermally damaged and precipitated to form fouling that greatly affect the treatment efficiency and alter the product’s desired features. Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations can then be successfully exploited, bringing forth temperature and velocity information that yield for deposit distributions when coupled to biochemical notations for thermal denaturation of fluid constituents. The present work exploits such modeling for a single-channel heat exchanger during pasteurization of milk. The model enforces a conjugate system of differential equations to a heat exchanger’s corrugated plate to combine flow, heat transfer and local transport of b-lactoglobulin. A preliminary computation has been performed that could be applied to geometry optimization (different corrugation shape and orientation) and for a variety of biochemically evolutive products.