Scientia Publishing House – Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania

Élelmiszeripari műveletek és berendezések. Tervkészítési útmutató [Unit Operations and Equipment in Food Industry. Project Design Guide]

The main objective of this guide is to familiarize students with the necessary steps in the elaboration of the technological project based on unit operations and with the sizing of the necessary equipment. It is known that the efficiency of production is largely influenced by well-designed, manufactured, and mounted plant. When designing modern technological lines, we take into account a number of aspects, ranging from the technically achieved level, the economic and social environment, to the habits of consumers. The extent to which a production unit meets the expectations of the near future depends on a number of factors, including the current technical level, the abundance of information the designer (designer team) has access, to and, last but not least, the available data processing tools and methods. A well-designed technology requires some important steps to be taken, namely:

– description of the quality of the product on the basis of its physical, chemical, physico-chemical, nutritional, and microbiological properties;

– exploring the technological manufacturing options, selecting, describing the most appropriate technology, presenting the list of unit operations and their parameters;

– defining the raw material(s), additive(s), excipients, intermediate products and heating and cooling agents and their characterization on the basis of the properties required in the technological calculations;

– analysis of the core process, material and energy balance, parameters, types of usable equipment, selection of equipment construction material, technological sizing;

– analysis of other operations in the process, calculation of the constructive parameters of apparatus and machines;

– indicators of the technological process: material and energy requirements, specific consumption, environmental impact, economic and financial analysis;

– the technical drawings necessary for the detailed project implementation.

The subject of the discipline Unit Operations and Equipment in the Food Industry – Project is limited to the study of unitary processes. However, a number of physical sizes are required in the technical calculation, which in fact link the operation under consideration to a particular product. Therefore, the specific design task may not be a technology in its entirety but only a part of it, in which a certain qualitative transformation of the incoming phases is carried out. In such a case, the economic calculation and cost estimates somewhat suffer in the approach, the emphasis being on the operations and apparatus in which the desired transformation is carried out. Since the discipline Unit Operations and Equipment in the Food Industry – Project is included in the academic curriculum as a discipline in its own right, the guide is designed to provide as much information as possible to the students, and the case studies included from literature provide support in carrying out similar independent tasks.

This guide is structured into six chapters. In the first chapter, the objectives are stated, in the second prescriptions can be found related to form and content, and in the third chapter the methodology of teaching the discipline is presented, also containing advice for the guiding teachers on how to organize the individual activity of the student. The fourth part deals with the characterization of materials, especially foods, highlighting important properties in design. In the fifth part are defined the materials and energy balance and some concrete solutions for solving balances by phases and components are presented. The sixth part, case studies, is the most extensive section. Based on the literature, operations are presented here that can be useful to future professionals both by their frequency in the food industry and their abundance in practical information. The selected operations intended to be carried out include phase mixing (mixing calculations), heat balance (heat exchanger calculation), and component separation operations both at equilibrium (evaporation, drying, distillation) and non-equilibrium (reverse osmosis) conditions. The guide ends with a list of bibliography. Some properties are presented in the Annexes, which may be useful in calculating and evaluating the results.