Addis Ababa Science and Technology University

Lecture notes for Unit operation in food processing

Department: Food Science and Nutrition

By: Tayto Mindahun (PhD candidate in Chemical Process and Product Design
(CPPD), MSc in Process Engineering, BSc in Chemical Engineering )
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
 Lecture 2
Material and Energy balance
What is material balance?
▪ Is the tracking of inflow material to a process, out flow from the process
and the accumulation amount of the product.
▪ Material and energy balance in food processing is a useful tool for
product formulation, process design, cost estimation and process
efficiency calculation.
▪ The required quantity of a component in a formulation can be calculated
from material balance.

Law of conservation of mass and energy

▪ States that, mass and energy can neither be created nor be destroyed. It
can be transformed from one form to another. So, the total mass or
energy applied to a process remains same.
The general mass balance equation
▪ The equation given below can be applied for any conserved quantity
such as total mass, mass of a specific species, energy, momentum.
 Special cases:
▪ The following rules may be used to simplify the material balance equation:
✓If the balanced quantity is total mass, set generation = consumption=0
✓If the balanced substance is a nonreactive species (neither a reactant nor a
product), set generation= consumption= 0.
✓If a system is at steady state, set accumulation= 0, regardless of what is being
balanced.
System and boundary:
▪ A system is necessarily a whole process
comprising various operations or a single unit
operation or a portion of a unit operation.
▪ A boundary is the area outside the system
through which the material comes in to the
system or goes out.
Basis and tie materials

▪ Having decided which constituents need consideration, the basis for the
calculations has to be decided.
▪ This might be some mass of raw material entering the process in a batch
system, or some mass per hour in a continuous process.
▪ Having selected the basis, then the units may be chosen such as mass, or
concentrations which can be by weight or can be molar if reactions are
important.
▪ A basis of an unknown quantity is considered, the value of which is required to
be calculated from a mass or energy balance.
▪ A ‘tie material’ is one of the components of a system or material which does
not change during process. They remain constant and do not undergo any
transformation or change in their properties.
 Overall Material Balances
▪ If the streams in Fig. given below have mass flow rates m1, m2, m3 and m4,
respectively, then, because the sum the mass flow rates of all streams entering the
process must equal the sum of the flow rates of all streams leaving the process,
𝐦𝟏 + 𝐦𝟐 = 𝐦𝟑 + 𝐦𝟒 (1)
▪ Equation (1) is an example of an overall material balance. The SI
unit of mass flow rate is kg s−1 but it may often be convenient to
use different units depending on the magnitude of flow rates in a
particular process.

▪ Example 1: Skim milk is prepared by the removal of some of the fat from whole milk.
This skim milk is found to contain 90.5% water, 3.5% protein, 5.1% carbohydrate,
0.1% fat and 0.8% ash. If the original milk contained 4.5% fat, calculate its
composition, assuming that fat only was removed to make the skim milk and that
there are no losses in processing.
 Concentration and Composition
▪ The concentration or composition of a stream can be expressed in a number of ways
as:
▪ Mass fraction (x): is simply the mass of a given component expressed as a fraction of
the total mass of the mixture containing that component. Thus if a mixture consists of
masses mA and mB of components A and B, respectively, the mass fraction of A is given
by:
𝐦𝐀
𝒙𝑨 =
𝐦𝐀 + 𝐦𝐁

▪ Mole fraction (y): is defined as the number of moles of a specified component

expressed as a fraction of the total number of moles in the mixture. Hence if the
mixture contains nA moles of A and nB moles of B, the mole fraction is given by:

𝐧𝐀
𝐲𝐀 =
𝐧𝐀 + 𝐧
Example 2:

▪ In the carbonation of a soft drink, the total quantity of carbon dioxide

required is the equivalent of 3 volumes of gas to one volume of water
at 0 ℃ and atmospheric pressure. Calculate
a) The mass fraction and
b) The mole fraction of the CO2 in the drink, ignoring all
components other than CO2 and water.
 Component Material Balances
▪ Suppose that each of the four streams in Fig. shown below contains water. At steady
state, the combined mass flow rate of water in all streams entering the process must
equal the combined mass flow rates of water leaving the process. Now if x is the mass
fraction of water in a stream of total mass flow rate m, then the mass flow rate of
water is xm. Hence :
𝐱 𝟏 𝐦𝟏 + 𝐱 𝟐 𝐦𝟐 = 𝐱𝟑 𝐦𝟑 + 𝐱𝟒 𝐦𝟒 (2)

Equation (2) is known as a component material balance.

Example 3:
Skim milk, with a fat content of 0.4% by mass, is produced by centrifuging whole milk
(containing 3.5% fat). The cream layer, which separates from the skim milk in the
centrifuge, contains 50% fat. What will be the proportion of skim milk to cream?
Recycle , purge and Bypass of a process
A recycle stream is one where a portion of the outlet of a process unit is
combined with fresh feed and sent into the same unit again.

Recycle may be used for a number of reasons:

(i) to increase the yield from a chemical reaction
by recycling unreacted species;
(ii) to reduce the inlet concentration of a given
component to a particular level by diluting that
component
(iii) To conserve energy by recycling high-
temperature streams which would otherwise be
wasted.
 Bypass stream
▪ A Bypass stream is one that skips one or more stages of the process and goes directly
to another downstream stage.

▪ Bypass stream can be used to control the composition of a final stream.

 Purge Stream
▪ Purge stream is a stream bled off to remove an accumulation of inerts or
unwanted material that might otherwise build up in the recycle stream.
 Example 4:

▪ A continuously operated rotary drier is used to dry 12 kg min−1 of a

starch-based food containing 25% moisture (wet weight basis) to give a
product containing 10% moisture. However, the drier cannot handle feed
material with a moisture content greater than 15% and therefore a
proportion of dry product must be recycled and mixed with the fresh feed.
Calculate the evaporation rate and the recycle ratio.
 Energy balance: Energy and forms of energy
▪ Energy is a fundamental concept in physics and is often defined as the ability to do
work or cause a change in a system.
▪ Energy takes many forms such as heat, kinetic energy, chemical energy, potential
energy.
▪ In many heat balances, other forms of energy are insignificant. Generally, the total
energy of a system has three components:
▪ Kinetic energy (KE): Energy due to the translational motion of the system as a whole relative to
some frame of reference (usually the earth’s surface) or to rotation of the system about some
axis.
▪ Potential Energy (PE): Energy due to the position of the system in a potential field (such as a
gravitational or electromagnetic field).
▪ Internal energy (U): All energy possessed by a system other than KE and PE, such as energy
due to the motion of molecules, to the rotational and vibrational motion and the
electromagnetic interactions of the molecules, and to the motion and interactions of the
atomic and subatomic constituents of the molecules.
 What is Energy balance?
▪ Energy balance calculations involve tracking how energy is transferred, converted, and
used within a system, and ensuring that the total energy remains constant in a closed
system.
▪ Just as mass is conserved, so is energy conserved in food-processing operations. The
energy coming into a unit operation can be balanced with the energy coming out and
the energy stored.
What is Energy balance?
▪ Energy balances can be calculated on the basis of external energy used per kilogram of
product, or raw material processed, or on dry solids. or some key component.
▪ The energy consumed in food production includes:
▪ Direct energy: which is fuel and electricity used on the farm, and in transport and in
factories, and in storage, selling, etc.; and
▪ Indirect energy: which is used to actually build the machines, to make the packaging, to
produce the electricity and the oil and so on.
▪ Heat transfer in food processing is a vital area where the energy is transferred from
the heating medium to the food product.
▪ So, an energy balance within a system would help us know the amount of heat
penetrated to the food material, as well as the heat efficiency of a system.
 Heat Balances
▪ The most common important energy form is heat energy and the conservation of this
can be illustrated by considering operations such as heating and drying.

▪ The energy equation can be written as;

Energy in = Energy out + Energy loss
Worked example 5:

▪ Fruit juice is fed to a heat exchanges at the rate of 15 kg/h. Saturated steam at 145
kPa pressure is used to heat the juice from 70C to 900C. Assuming the heat capacity
of juice 5kJ/kg0C, find out the quantity of steam required for the operation.
Worked example 6:
▪ Orange juice (with a mean heat capacity of 3.8 kJ kg−1 K−1) enters a heat exchanger
at 12◦C with a flow rate of 500 kg h−1. It is heated by water flowing at 0.11 kg s−1
and the water temperature falls from 80 to 30◦C. What is the final temperature of
the orange juice?
 Review questions
1. A processing unit is producing a product of 100kg which must contain 15% of fat and
this is to be made up from component A with 23% of fat and from component B with
5% of fat. What are the proportions in which these should be mixed?
2. For the given process

a) What is A in the process?

b) What is B in the process?
End of lecture 2