ROLL-BOND HEAT EXCHANGER (RHE) DESIGN AND APPLICATION TO A CHOCOLATE COOLING TUNNEL - A NUMERICAL STUDY

Abstract

The snack sector has a significant market today. It is expected that the snacks will look as promised on the packaging and that the product will have no deformations or defects. The entire area of liquid chocolatecovered snack products entering the chocolate cooling tunnel must be cooled homogeneously. If all surfaces of the chocolate are not sufficiently cooled, a problem of sticking to the conveyor belt can occur. This study investigates the performance of roll-bond heat exchangers under different operating conditions to solve the snack sector’s technical problems. For this purpose, a CAD model of a roll-bond heat exchanger is created. A steady-state heat transfer problem is established in the SolidWorks Flow Simulation environment, and the problem is solved numerically. The maximum, minimum, and average values of the fluid temperature, pressure difference, fluid velocity, and solid temperature distributions are calculated for different inlet velocities and temperatures. In addition, the standard deviations of the solid temperature values are calculated and evaluated. The results show that the roll-bond heat exchanger applies to the chocolate cooling tunnel and is much more efficient for heat transfer than the conventional design.

Keywords

• development of roll-bond heat exchanger
• computational fluid dynamics
• heat exchanger performance
• industrial cooling tunnel
• chocolate product cooling