Chiller - your experience

[Mall]

I pump water from water tank into 30 plate chiller and back to tank so no waste. Gravity feed wort from Keggle to plate chiller to fermentor or sometimes to other kettle to re feed to plate chiller if I miss the temp.

Worst case 15 minutes to get to pitching temp.

 

[Adr_0]

Cool, I'm not talking about a plate chiller though. CFC, why would I make this up haha

Maybe I need to measure and be more specific next time, wouldn't want to piss you guys off about how much water I have/haven't used.

To the OP, ignore my posts mate they are clearly misleading!

No, you're not mistaken, I am - I was stuck in the IC world for a while there but have seen the light again. My lines were (literally) crossed.

 

[Moad]

Or, you know, whatever. If you have a special CFC I'd love to get one...

Nup, can't have it.

One thing that did surprise me is that the water coming out of the "hot" end of the CFC was not very hot at all. In the IC it was basically the same temp as the wort.

Maybe on brew day I was drunk and therefore miscalculated by gigalitres and 50 degress

 

[klangers]

CFC is the industry (process/industrial) standard for a heat exchanger, which keeps in mind the most efficient way to transfer heat from one medium to another. Think there are a few questions people are trying to answer here by bringing in sanitation issues and the likes, but....

If we look at the options purely for the fastest way to chill the wort with a fixed temp and volume of cooling water the CFC will be #1 every time. Its goverened by the rules/fundamentals of thermodynamics.

Yeah - The vast majority of heat exchangers in industry are counter flow. You'd be crazy to not design them in counterflow unless there was a very good reason. Tube-in-tube heat exchangers are rarely used in industry due to their huge cost and relative volumetric inefficiency. Any food and beverage application will use a plate heat exchanger configured in counter-flow - even refrigeration plants.

Shell and tube exchangers aren't really possible to get true counterflow due to the flow paths inside. For this reason they're somewhat inefficient (as well as bulky). To date though, they're the often the only thing that works for severe conditions such as those in refineries etc.

As Adr said laws of thermo only explain the general behaviour of the energy flow. To actually calculate the flow of energy we're talking actually solving 4 dimensional partial differential equations or empirical equations which approximate them, such as log mean temperature difference.

The waters are getting clouded here by calling a homemade tube-in-tube unit a "counterflow chiller". Any heat exchanger in which the two (or however many) flow streams are flowing in opposite directions can be called a counterflow chiller.

A tube-in-tube unit with the same area available for heat transfer (and strictly speaking the same Nusselt number, Reynold's number) as a plate unit will perform the same. It's just that plate units pack a higher surface area into a smaller package.

 

[syl]

Yes. Plates rock! Thanks all, just reading through I have decided to get a plate chiller when in the states next month!

 

[dago001]

Not to mention they are a bit cheaper. Even here in Ozland you can pick up a 30 plate chiller for around $100. + postage.
I dont want to get into flow rates again. Man was that a sh!t fight. But some very good points have been made here, thanks Adr_0
Cheers
LB