INFLUENCE OF FLOW REGIMES ON TEMPERATURE HETEROGENEITIES WITHIN A SCRAPED SURFACE HEAT EXCHANGER

In industrial applications, fluids processed in scraped sugace heat exchangers ofen show large temperature heterogeneities at the exchanger outlet. Our study deals with the thermal evolution of model fluids, Newtonian and nonNewtonian in heating or cooling conditions andallows us to link the phenomena of appearance and disappearance of temperature heterogeneities with the changes in the flow pattern within the exchanger. Based on literature data dedicated to scraped su@ace heat exchangers as well as to annular spaces without blades, we have shown that thermally homogeneous products can be obtained when Taylor vortices appear in the exchanger. Studies done on the exchanger with and without blades show that the them1 behavior is basically the same for both geometries but with a difference in critical Taylor numbers value for change in heat transfer regime. The presence of blades promotes the appearance of instabilities at lower values of generalized Taylor number (Tat = 10 with blades; Ta, = 39 without blades). It shows as well, that the value of critical Taylor number in scraped surface heat exchanger closely depends upon the flow-rate even for very low values for Re,, {Re,, <