Strategy to enhance thermal efficiency of evaporators in an industrial jaggery production

Abstract

This study is focused on improving the simple and traditional jaggery production process in India. Jaggery is the most common sweetener used traditionally in India for ages and a cost-effective improvement over the simpler production is beneficial economically. To help improve with the process two methods were considered viz: addition of fins and usage of closed tube heat exchanger. Fin geometries that were considered were rectangular, triangular and cylindrical. Rectangular fins performed more robustly in terms of heat transfer by a factor of 2.5 than the other two types while the triangular fins provided the maximum efficiency of 95%. Cylindrical fins performed well when compared to the traditional method but paled in comparison to the other two types of fins. The closed tube heat exchanger also compared well with the traditional method in terms of heat transfer by a factor 1.5.