Chapter 12 - Kettle design for arequipe production

Abstract

The food industry represents 21.5% of the productive sector in Colombia, among them, the dairy sector is in the order of billions. In particular, the preparations of concentrated dulce de leche, commonly known as arequipe, is a food that, apart from being traditional, is widely consumed in different scenarios. Engineering, within its fields of action, has the task of developing systems, operations, equipment, processes, products, prototypes, etc. The logical and systematic sequence of this project, known as “design,” is presented. Thus, by chapters: (1) In the introduction, there is a context of the subject; (2) the kettle, types, and configuration; (3) the engineering analysis, (a) mass balance, (b) energy balance (first law of thermodynamics), (c) entropy and/or exergy balance, and (d) optimization; (4) design-dimensioning, where the nine steps in the design of thermal systems are presented, and where the key components in the design of kettles are identified, which coincide with those in the literature: the vessel or tank, the turbine impeller, the heat supply system, a flow meter, a pressure gauge, two temperature gauges, and as key elements of the system, the type of agitators available; (5) control and instrumentation, showing a compilation of the range of instruments available for each of the operating variables of a kettle; (6) optimization, where a parallel of advantages and limitations of numerical optimization is presented, in addition to suggesting the high potential of modeling and simulation by using commercial or free software; and (7) an example of the preliminary calculation is presented, since, for a robust design, more information should be available, such as capacity, location, materials, budget, and computational resources. Finally, it is necessary to mention that, in the design of thermal systems in general, and of equipment such as the kettle in particular, the complexity includes the three major transport phenomena: mass, energy, and quantity of movement. And within the energy, the three mechanisms or modes of heat transfer are verified: conduction, convection, and radiation.