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 Fig. 8.1.

Figure 8.1 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 Fig. 8.1 is a typical example.

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