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Quotes - Engineering - SalesHeat Exchangers For
Food and
Beverage Processing
Food plants use shell and tube exchangers on utility duty far more than on direct product contact: CIP solution heating, process water, brewery liquor and general plant heating.
What differs from ordinary industrial work is the cleaning regime and the consequence of a cross-leak. Both push toward double-wall construction on anything that touches potable or product water, and toward equipment that can be opened and inspected.
Send the full cleaning cycle, not just the process conditions. Hot caustic and acid alternating is frequently more aggressive than the product the circuit handles.
Request a QuoteFood and Beverage Processing
Cleaning Chemistry Counts as Service
A surprising number of material problems in food plants trace to the cleaning cycle rather than the process. Hot caustic, acid descaling and chlorinated sanitizers are all more aggressive than the product they clean up after.
Tell us the cleaning regime along with the process conditions. Selecting against the product and failing on the sanitizer is a common and avoidable outcome.
Utility Duty, Not Product Contact
Bell & Gossett shell and tube units serve food plants mainly on utility duty: heating CIP solutions, process water, brewery liquor and plant hot water. Direct product contact is usually plate or tubular sanitary equipment instead.
That distinction matters when specifying. A CIP heater does not need 3-A construction; it needs to survive the chemistry and be cleanable itself.
Double-Wall on Potable and Product Water
Where a steam or boiler circuit heats water that will contact product, double-wall construction removes the cross-contamination question rather than arguing about it. The DSU and DWU ranges cover it.
The requirement varies by jurisdiction and by the plant's own quality system, and it is worth settling before the order.
Ramp Rate Rather Than Standing Load
On CIP duty the commercial cost is changeover time. Once solution is at setpoint the standing load is small; what matters is how quickly the tank gets there, because that time is production the line is not making.
CIP heaters are therefore sized on heat-up rate rather than hold duty, which frequently makes them larger than a steady-state calculation suggests.
What We Need to Size a Food Plant Exchanger
The full cleaning cycle, not just the process conditions. Every solution the exchanger will see, its concentration, its temperature and the order they run in. Hot caustic and acid alternating is more aggressive than most of the product the circuit handles, and chlorinated sanitizer at temperature changes the material conversation entirely.
For CIP duty, the tank volume, the temperature rise and the changeover time you want. CIP heaters are sized on ramp rate rather than standing load, because once the solution is at setpoint the heat requirement is small and what costs money is the line standing still.
For process water, the flow, the temperatures, and whether that water contacts product. If it does, a non-potable heating medium across a single tube wall is exactly the cross-contamination case double-wall construction exists to prevent, and both code and your own quality system may require it.
And the shift pattern. A plant running one shift puts its heater through a full thermal cycle every day; a continuous plant does not. The first is a cycling duty that suits the free expansion of a U-tube bundle, and both need the control arrangement checked at the load the plant actually runs at rather than only at the design peak.
