Scambiatoti Microscambiatori per l’industria farmaceutica e alimentare

The thesis aims to discuss the application and optimization of conventional and micro heat exchangers within the pharmaceutical and food industries, focusing on their critical roles in enhancing process efficiency and product quality. By examining traditional heat exchangers, which are integral to large-scale operations for maintaining consistent temperature control, and comparing them with advanced micro heat exchangers, which offer precision and compactness for smaller-scale or specialized processes. The research investigates how these technologies contribute to enhancing energy efficiency, regulatory compliance, and overall process optimization, providing insights into their design, operational performance, and potential for innovation in high-demand environments. Moreover, this thesis also offers valuable recommendations for the effective implementation of heat exchange systems to the specific needs of the pharmaceutical and food sectors. Heat transfer enhancement is crucial in the food and pharmaceutical industries to enhance process efficiency, product quality, and energy savings. To improve the local convective heat transfer coefficient, this research introduces an inverse study approach using an experimental infrared camera to measure temperature data obtained within a corrugated pipe. Specifically, six pipes with different corrugation profiles were studied to investigate the effects of various designs, including helical, transversal, and cross-helical types, with pitch sizes of 16 mm and 32 mm. To evaluate their effect on heat transfer performance, the findings were examined and presented from both local and average viewpoints. The results indicate that pitch size and corrugation type/design play a significant role in enhancing the performance of the tested pipe. The result of this research in turbulent regime has shown that transversal corrugation generates the highest improvement in heat transfer performance. Consequently, the single helix solution is the preferred one in heat exchangers adopted in the food and pharmaceutical industries, and these helical corrugations are the easiest to manufacture. A merger solution between them is represented by the cross-helix profile. The cross-helix profile with the bigger pitch size performs better than all other corrugated pipes, especially in the low/intermediate Reynolds number range (i.e., 100-1000). The estimation process (for local heat transfer) proposed in this study employs the external surface temperature of the tube, acquired with an infrared thermal camera, as starting data for the inverse heat conduction problem inside the pipe wall region. The calculation of its Laplacian was finally achieved by a filtering technique applied to the infrared temperature acquisitions.