Experimental Investigation on the Heat Transfer Performance of a Scraped Surface Heat Exchanger for Highly Viscous Foods

Scraped Surface Heat Exchangers (SSHEs) provide an interesting solution in order to actively enhance the convective heat transfer mechanism when highly viscous fluids have to be treated. The investigations available in literature about these heat exchangers are rare, especially under laminar flow regime conditions. Moreover, due to the specificity of each product, it is difficult to generalize the few data available, by making the thermal design of these apparatuses a critical point. This paper concerns with a pilot plant designed in order to evaluate the performance of a concentric SSHE, especially intended for highly viscous fluid foods. Preliminary experimental results are compared to the prediction of an analytical model and to the few empirical heat transfer correlations available in literature suitable for this application.