Laminar forced convection in a cylindrical collinear ohmic sterilizer

The present work deals with a thermo-fluid analysis of a collinear cylindrical ohmic heater in laminar flow. The geometry of interest is a circular electrically insulated glass pipe with two electrodes at the pipe ends. For this application, since the electrical conductivity of a liquid food depends strongly on the temperature, the thermal analysis of an ohmic heater requires the simultaneous solution of the electric and thermal fields. In the present work the analysis involves decoupling the previous fields by means of an iterative procedure. The thermal field has been calculated using an analytical solution, which leads to fast calculations for the temperature distribution in the heater. Some considerations of practical interest for the design are also given.