Application of inductive forced heating as a new approach to food industry heat exchangers

Heat exchangers are one of the main equipment used in food industry because of their convenience to transfer energy to both auxiliary facilities and various food products. In food industry, there are several reasons for heat transfer such as pre-heating, pasteurizing and sterilizing in which heat exchangers require high amount of energy. On the other hand, as being a unique quality assurance unit heat exchangers should be cleaned easily and extensively. Having high operating costs due to energy consumption and requiring high investment cost due to ensure a reliable hygienic design make heat transfer units an expensive and energy-consuming unit. Therefore, developing new approaches to generate energy and transferring it hygienically with minimum loses will be an opportunity for the food industry. With the view of developing new equipment for industry, induction-driven heating system was investigated in this study and energy and exergy efficiencies were calculated and compared with conventional heat exchanger system. Selected food system was the tomato paste sterilization/pasteurization which is a part of tomato paste production line. After assumptions and theoretical calculations for both conventional application and inductive heating, it was found that inductive heating system has 95.00% energy efficiency and 46.56% second law efficiency while the conventional heating system with electric boiler has 75.43% energy efficiency and 16.63% exergy efficiency. As a consequence, inductive method was found more beneficial compared to a commercial method having higher energy and exergy efficiencies.