Heat and mass transfer with chemical kinetics in alcoholic fermentation of multiple sugars: Lumped formulation and dimensional analysis

Abstract

A consistent non-dimensional lumped-capacitance formulation for heat and mass transfer in alcoholic fermentation has been developed. The formulation stems from a generalization of previous dimensional models, written for an arbitrary number of fermentable species. A comprehensive dimensional analysis of the problem was performed, leading to a concise — and physically meaningful — set of dimensionless groups associated with the occurring physical and chemical phenomena, as well as a set of normalized governing equations. Numerical solutions for the normalized formulations were implemented for both isothermal and non-isothermal fermentation cases, and the results were verified by comparing with experimental data from previous studies. Finally, a parametric analysis was conducted for illustrating the effect of the proposed parameters on the solution of the problem. This analysis was presented for isothermal fermentation – demonstrating the effects of the dimensionless groups related to the Michaelis–Menten kinetics and the inoculation ratios – and for non-isothermal fermentation, demonstrating the effect of the heat transfer coefficient on the fermentation process.