Modeling heat efficiency, flow and scale-up in the corotating disc scraped surface heat exchanger

A comparison of two different scale corotating disc scraped surface heat exchangers (CDHE) was performed experimentally. The findings were compared to predictions from a finite element model. We find that the model predicts well the flow pattern of the two CDHE's investigated. The heat transfer performance predicted by the model agrees well with experimental observations for the laboratory scale CDHE whereas the overall heat transfer in the scaled-up version was not in equally good agreement.

The lack of the model to predict the heat transfer performance in scale-up leads us to identify the key dimensionless parameters relevant for scale-up.