Plate heat exchanger modelling

FrieslandCampina is one of the largest dairy cooperatives in the world. In most of FrieslandCampina’s dairy production sites heat treatment, specifically pasteurization, is a crucial process that demands precise temperature control and efficient heat transfer to ensure product quality, safety, and shelf life.
Focusing on FrieslandCampina's dairy production sites, this study explores the use of Plate Heat Exchangers (PHEs) for efficient heat transfer in pasteurization processes. These compact heat exchangers have emerged as a well-established and widely used units in the food and beverage industry, including dairy production, facilitating efficient heat transfer in processes such as pasteurization, sterilization, and cooling. However, to fully harness their potential, have a deeper understanding of the process, identify the key parameters that affect the performance of the unit and find optimization points, it is crucial to develop, review, and validate a plate heat exchanger model that captures the intricacies of both low and high viscosity products.
Over the years FrieslandCampina has developed a range of in-house model libraries covering a wide range of process units. These model libraries are used for CAPEX decision support, troubleshooting, scenario analysis, process or product optimization and control. Therefore, by reviewing and validating a PHE mechanistic model, FrieslandCampina aims to gain a comprehensive understanding of the process dynamics, identify key factors that affect the performance of the unit and find optimization points.
This project results in providing FrieslandCampina with a validated PHE model for low and high viscosity products in gPROMS environment, which will allow internal benchmarking with the PHE vendors performance data and challenge the suppliers design, enabling FrieslandCampina to make the optimal CAPEX decisions during PHE acquisition. In addition, the model's flexibility allows for testing different products in the future, ensuring sustained cost-effectiveness and laying the basis for the model to act as digital twin, contributing to enhanced process optimization and production efficiency within FrieslandCampina.