An Investigation of Heat Transfer Performance in an Agitated Vessel

Abstract

Agitated vessels (or mechanically stirred reactors) are heat exchange devices that are most widely used in many chemical and biochemical process industries, such as anaerobic digestion process. The mixing and heat transfer performances in these vessels are of crucial importance for increasing the energy efficiency in both batch and continuous processes. In this paper, a series of experiments were conducted to investigate heat transfer performance in agitated vessels for various configurations. In fact, this study examines the effects of heat transfer geometry (wall jacket and helical coils), heating power, and stirring speed, on the heating performance of two stirred fluids—water alone and a mixture of water and food waste. The experiments were conducted using a jacketed insulation tank with a helical coil and a propeller agitator. In each experiment, a transient method, based on measuring the temperature dependency on time, and solving the unsteady enthalpy balance, was used to determine the overall heat transfer coefficients between the agitated fluid and the heating surface. Finally, an extensive analysis of the reduced data was conducted based on temperature, heating time, heat transfer rate, heat transfer coefficient, and thermal resistance. The main finding was that the presence of food waste in agitated vessels reduces the heat rate of the agitated fluid with an average of 18.13% and 49.51%, respectively, for the case of JHX and CHX, and creates additional fouling, which further limits the heat transfer.