Hybrid Tubular Plate Heat Exchanger as Evaporator

In order to extract sugar crystals from sugar beet juice heat exchangers – more precisely: evaporators – are used. Using hot steam, the juice is thickened in several stages until its dry matter content increases from 16 % to 75 %. Instead, it is still common today in many sugar factories that the sugar juice in the so-called natural circulation repeatedly boiled and thickened – sometimes so often that in some cases, the sugar quality suffers. Hybrid falling film evaporators achieve the required evaporation effect much more quickly by reducing the number of passes and protecting the medium.

Advantages:

•  significant material savings

• better heat transfer
• compact designnoticeable cost reduction
• double capacity
• protection of the medium
• low hold-up
• significantly more flexibility
• individual customization options
• use of saved space  to expand the heating surface

In addition, there are advantages resulting from the physical properties of the plate shape. With the same heating surface the hybrid plate heat exchanger achieves twice the capacity. In many applications, while maintaining capacity, the heating surface can be reduced by half, resulting in additional space and material savings.

The fully welded hybrid plate heat exchanger, as it is manufactured by VAU Thermotech, has a further advantage, which has a positive effect on the replacement of equipment in old systems. For shell & tube heat exchangers, restrictions in design must be taken into account. The plate evaporator from VAU Thermotech offer significantly more flexibility. The inlets of the headers and pipes can be customized. They can be arranged as needed and thus flexibly.

Manfred Hermanns, Dipl.-Ing.

Frank Betzold, Dipl.-Ing.

Project Engineer
Phone: +49 34673 1683 23
E-Mail: frank.betzold@vau-thermotech.de