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Energy Consumption during Refractance Window™ Evaporation of Selected Berry Juices

Published by the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, St. Joseph, Michigan www.asabe.org

Citation:  Paper number  036224,  2003 ASAE Annual Meeting . (doi: 10.13031/2013.14225) @2003
Authors:   Caleb I. Nindo, Juming Tang, Joseph R. Powers, Karin Bolland
Keywords:   Falling liquid film, evaporation, energy consumption, blueberry, raspberry, juice

The Refractance Window evaporator is a patented technology that uses hot water at atmospheric pressure to evaporate water from liquid foods. Energy from the circulating hot water is transmitted through a plastic sheet interface to evaporate water from a liquid product flowing concurrently on the top surface of the plastic. The objectives are to study this evaporators heat transfer characteristics, determine its energy consumption, and capacity at different tilt angles and specified flow rates. Using water, raspberry and blueberry juices/purees as feed, temperature and flow rates of both heated water and feed were recorded to determine the evaporator performance. The steam economy ranged from 0.64 and 0.84, while the average evaporation capacity and product temperature were 24.5 kg/hr.m and 65C, respectively. The highest evaporation rate was 31.8 kg/hr.m. The average specific energy consumption was 2492~2719 kJ/kg of water evaporated. These results are expected to improve after the airflow and heat exchange optimization is completed.

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