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Sizing your heat exchanger and CLT?

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  • Sizing your heat exchanger and CLT?

    We're planning on using a plastic CLT residing in our cold room to cool wort from 206 down to 70. (And run the water back to the HLT for next batch.)

    I understand there's a relationship between the size of your heat exchanger and the temperature and volume of your cold water, but don't know the formula.

    Alternately would love any commentary on our wort-chilling strategy.

  • #2
    This is totally typical

    Nothing real new here. The 'formula' you mention is merely a sizing formula for plate heat exchangers. There are a few manufacturers who have a sizing application on their site. You would typically want to recover 120% of your batch size as hot liquor. This allows for vessel rinse/warmup before brewing, mash evaporation, spent grain moisture, etc.... So size your HLT and CLT at about 120% batch size minimum. More if you are doing multiple batches/day. Temperatures depend on the heat exchanger selected. More efficient units will have more surface area and be more expensive. Usually I would size a heat exchanger to reach 80C in the HLT in 40 minutes of knockout. With this information, you can now plug into the applications or have a sales person do it for you. You need to specify:
    Time of exchange,
    Temperature of wort,
    Volume of wort,
    Volume of cold liquor (as above, I recommend 120% of wort volume),
    Desired temperature of cooled wort

    Temperature of cold liquor, temperature rise of hot liquor and plate heat exchanger surface area is now calculated. Good luck!
    Phillip Kelm--Palau Brewing Company Manager--

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    • #3
      I would just add my two cents of experience on our first system. We had a ~20 bbl plastic tank in our cold room, used to knock out our ~13 bbl batches. For one batch a day, our cold room would get the CLT down from about 80 F in the summer to about 40 F by the next day. We would use almost all of the 20 bbls to cool the wort down. When we started doing multiple batches a day, I had to add a copper coil to the inside of the tank, and run glycol through it, to get the CLT back down to around 50 F by the time of the next knockout.

      Also, put some type of automatic fill valve on your CLT. Don't rely on a brewer to remember that he has the CLT fill valve open, or you will flood your cold room about twice a day. I think what we did was put a solenoid on the city water inlet, that was tied to a float switch and to the CLT pump relay. As long as the CLT pump was running, the solenoid would not open. But when the pump was shut off at the end of knockout, and the float switch was made, the water solenoid would open and fill the tank. Then the float switch would close the solenoid when the tank was full.
      Linus Hall
      Yazoo Brewing
      Nashville, TN
      www.yazoobrew.com

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      • #4
        great feedback and info, thanks to both of you!

        We are imagining maybe using straight tap water for the first half of cool down, but our tap water is terrible and warm, so then we'd use RO water from the CLT for the remainder needed.

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        • #5
          Linus - great idea about CLT fill control.
          dick

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          • #6
            We have a two stage HX for our 2 bbl brewhouse. First stage is city water that we capture in the HLT for cleaning or next brew. Second stage is chilled 40 deg water from our 600 gallon plastic tank. We recirc the chilled water from the tank through the HX back to the tank. Our tank is not in the cooler. We chill our tank will a coil in the tank. On two BBLS we only see a rise of three degrees in the plastic tank.

            Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G900A using Tapatalk
            Jon Sheldon
            Owner/Brewer/Chief Floor Mopper
            Bugnutty Brewing Company
            www.bugnutty.com

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            • #7
              Didn't address that right....

              CLT in cold room is not best idea. I should have mentioned that. Cool you CLT with glycol if you can.
              Phillip Kelm--Palau Brewing Company Manager--

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