Technical Papers and Presentations

Ohmic heating is a volumetric heating technology which can effectively process almost any pumpable fluid with extremely high energy efficiency (>95%). This is particularly useful for very thick fluids, those that burn on to hot surfaces and those with high solids content which would cause difficulties for conventional heating techniques. Processing of animal by-products (ABP) faces all these challenges. For this application a three stage ohmic heater was simulated. COMSOL Multiphysics® was used to model flow through the ohmic heater and associated pipework, combining fluid flow of a very viscous material with joule heating. This enabled the temperature profile through the heater to be defined and the electrical fields modelled. Particle tracking was also utilized to show the movement of the solid particles present in the fluid.