EVAPORATION

Background of Experiment

Tradition leads us to believe that evaporation is one of the oldest techniques known to humanity. It is
nevertheless regarded now as an essential unit operation in modern Chemical Engineering. The aim of
evaporation is to concentrate a solution consisting of a volatile solvent and a non-volatile solute. This unit
operation is achieved by vaporizing part of the solvent to produce a concentrated solution. Most
evaporation operation used by industry uses water as the solvent.

Typical examples of evaporation are concentration of aqueous solutions of sugar, sodium chloride, sodium
hydroxide, milk, and orange juice. The climbing film evaporator is a special type of evaporator, which
provides a high heat transfer coefficient and a short residence time for the solution being evaporated. Multi-
tube evaporators are used to concentrate solutions such a fruit juices that can be damaged by prolonged
heat. They are usually operated under vacuum, which reduces the evaporation temperature and increases
the heat flux.

Objective of Experiment

In this experiment, students are assigned to study the operation of evaporator.

Scopes of Experiment

In this experiment, you have to perform single effect evaporation experiments using a climbing film
evaporator under atmospheric pressure. Then, based on the collected data, you are required to perform
mass and energy balances for a single effect climbing film evaporator.

Description of Experiment

Evaporation is a widely used process in engineering as a simple technique to concentrate solutions. It is

used when one component is volatile and the remaining components are essentially non-volatile. It is used
in numerous industries to concentrate aqueous solutions. It has been widely used as a means of desalting
seawater. For this use, chemical engineers have developed a highly heat-integrated approach to maximize
the thermal efficiency. The key to obtain a high-energy efficiency is the use of multi-effect evaporation as
illustrated in Figure 1.1:
Figure 1.1: Standard flow of multi effect evaporator system

The cascade takes vapour from the first unit and uses it to boil the solution. The same concept is used for
the second unit and can be followed by further contacting units. The only requirement is that the pressure in
each stage is lower than the previous one: this allows the vapour to provide the necessary temperature
driving force to boil the solution. The optimal number of units in a multi-effect evaporation process requires
a process analysis of the trade-off between energy savings and the capital costs for the contacting units.

The experimental unit in the Unit Operations Laboratory is a single evaporation unit. It allows a study of the
heat transfer characteristic of the unit, essential for process design and to provide the experimental data for
the generation of a complete heat and material balance.

The Single Effect Evaporator

The typical evaporator is made up of three functional sections: the heat exchanger, the evaporating section,
where the liquid boils and evaporates, and the separator in which the vapour leaves the liquid and passes
off to the condenser or to other equipment. In many evaporators, all three sections are contained in a single
vertical cylinder.

In the centre of the cylinder there is a steam heating section, with pipes passing through it in which the
evaporating liquors rise. At the top of the cylinder, there are baffles, which allow the vapours to escape but
check liquid droplets that may accompany the vapours from the liquid surface. A diagram of this type of
evaporator, which may be called the conventional evaporator, is given in Figure 1.2
Figure 1.2: Single effect evaporator

In the heat exchanger section, called a calandria in this type of evaporator, steam condenses in the outer
jacket and the liquid being evaporated boils on the inside of the tubes and in the space above the upper
tube plate. The resistance to heat flow is imposed by the steam and liquid film coefficients and by the
material of the tube walls. The circulation of the liquid greatly affects evaporation rates, but circulation rates
and patterns are very difficult to predict in any detail. Values of overall heat transfer coefficients that have
been reported for evaporators are of the order of 1800-5000 J m-2 s-1 °C-1 for the evaporation of distilled
water in a vertical-tube evaporator with heat supplied by condensing steam. However, with dissolved solids
in increasing quantities as evaporation proceeds leading to increased viscosity and poorer circulation, heat
transfer coefficients in practice may be much lower than this.

As evaporation proceeds, the remaining liquors become more concentrated and because of this the boiling
temperatures rise. The rise in the temperature of boiling reduces the available temperature drop, assuming
no change in the heat source. And so the total rate of heat transfer will drop accordingly. Also, with
increasing solute concentration, the viscosity of the liquid will increase, often quite substantially, and this
affects circulation and the heat transfer coefficients leading again to lower rates of boiling. Yet another
complication is that measured, overall, heat transfer coefficients have been found to vary with the actual
temperature drop, so that the design of an evaporator on theoretical grounds is inevitably subject to wide
margins of uncertainty.

Perhaps because of this uncertainty, many evaporator designs have tended to follow traditional patterns of
which the calandria type of Figure 1.2 is a typical example
EXperimental Result

Example of the table of experimental result is as Table 6.1:

Table 1.1: Experimental result of evaporation

Pressure, Volume, ml Refractive index, nD

Time, s T1, oC T2, oC
bar V3 V5 V3 V5

10

0.5 15

20

25

30

10

1.0 15

20

25

30

10

1.5 15

20

25

30
Result Discussion

Questions

The following questions must be explained explicitly in the result discussion.

1. Draw the process block diagram (PBD) and the process flow diagram (PFD) for the entire
evaporation system studied in this experiment. Explain the process thoroughly.

2. A key aspect of this experiment is the heat and material balance. This is essential information for
any engineering process.

a. Perform a material balance:

Total balance:

F=L+V

Where;

F: feed mass flow rate

L: concentrated liquid mass flow rate

V: Evaporated water mass flow rate

Solute balance:

F xF = L xL

Where;

xF: mass fraction of solids in feed

xL: mass fraction of solids in concentrate

 b. Perform an energy balance and calculate heat losses:

Energy balance for the steam side is,

q = S(HS - hS ) = S 

Where:

q: rate of heat transfer through heating surface from steam

HS: specific enthalpy of steam

hS: specific enthalpy of condensate

 : latent heat of condensation of steam

S: mass flow rate of steam.

Energy balance for the liquor side is,

q = L hL + V HV – F hF + heat losses

Where;

hL: specific enthalpy of concentrate

HV: specific enthalpy of vapor

HF: specific enthalpy of feed

3. Calculate the evaporator (or steam) economy.

*Note: See Geankoplis (reference # 1) pp. 489-519.

 4. The heat and material balance results can be used to calculate the process efficiency:

weight water product

weight steam used

The data also allows an analysis of the heat exchanger and a determination of the overall heat transfer
coefficient.

5. Plot a graph of refractive index versus concentration of salt solution for the standard mixture, and
discuss the findings.

6. Plot a graph of steam pressure versus concentration of salt solution obtained from the evaporation
process, then discuss the result.

7. Compare the concentration of salt solution obtained at V3 and V5 and discuss the difference and
the factors that influence the findings.