MATHEMATICAL MODELLING OF OVERALL HEAT TRANSFER COEFFICIENTS IN CONCENTRATION OF LEMON JUICE USING RECONCILED DATA

Citrus production is one of the main agro-industrial activities in Tucuman, Argentina, with a value in 2017 estimated at US$1,178 million. Production of lemon juice concentrate requires the use of evaporation systems. Those systems are critical for water and energy consumption in process industries. Precise knowledge of process variables is therefore extremely important for evaluation of the efficiency, economic parameters, etc. of the whole plant. In this work, data reconciliation and gross error detection were performed for a lemon juice concentration system. Data were collected from an industrial plant located in Tucuman, Argentina. From reconciled data, the overall heat transfer coefficients (OHTC) for all evaporators were calculated. In addition, a mathematical model was developed to predict the overall heat transfer coefficients. The parameters of the model were fitted to experimental and reconciled data. The OHTC models could be used to estimate the behavior of the plant under different scenarios.