DYNAMIC ANALYSIS OF THE COOLING PROCESS IN PLATE HEAT EXCHANGERS

摘要

This paper describes a dynamic simulation of a mathematical model that describes the cooling process of natural orange juice in plate heat exchangers. The goal was to obtain an evaluation of the process reaction curves, represented by the behavior of the outlet orange juice's temperature after simultaneous disturbances to the following process variables: product and refrigerant fluid temperatures and mass flow rates. The simulator was encoded using the Mat-Lab program, whose effectiveness had been previously validated (predicted values were within 2% of the published values). Assays were simulated based on the factorial design technique. The importance of variable interaction was evaluated and it was shown that each combination of disturbances to the process gave way to different effects on outlet temperature stabilization values and on the behavior of process reaction curves. The monitoring of the process variable transient behavior has been found to aid in tuning controllers throughout this process, which requires, according to the results, nonconventional controllers for truly efficient automation.