The popularity of orange juice, especially as a breakfast drink, makes this beverage an

QUESTION:

The popularity of orange juice, especially as a breakfast drink, makes this beverage an important factor in the economy of orange-growing regions. Most marketed juice is concentrated and frozen and then reconstituted before consumption, and some is not-from-concentrate. Although concentrated juices are less popular in the United States than they were at one time, they still have a major segment of the market for orange juice. The approaches to concentrating orange juice include evaporation, freeze concentration, and reverse osmosis. Here we examine the evaporation process by focusing only on two constituents in the juice: solids and water. Fresh orange juice contains approximately 10 wt% solids (sugar, citric acid, and other ingredients) and frozen concentrate contains approximately 42 wt% solids. The frozen concentrate is obtained by evaporating water from the fresh juice to produce a mixture that is approximately 65 wt% solids. However, so that the flavor of the concentrate will closely approximate that of fresh juice, the concentrate from the evaporator is blended with fresh orange juice (and other additives) to produce a final concentrate that is approximately 42 wt% solids. (a) Draw and label a flowchart of this process, neglecting the vaporization of everything in the juice but water. First prove that the subsystem containing the point where the bypass stream splits off from the evaporator feed has one degree of freedom. (If you think it has zero degrees, try determining the unknown variables associated with this system.) Then perform the degree-offreedom analysis for the overall system, the evaporator, and the bypassevaporator product mixing point, and write in order the equations you would solve to determine all unknown stream variables. In each equation, circle the variable for which you would solve, but dont do any calculations. (b) Calculate the amount of product (42% concentrate) produced per 100 kg fresh juice fed to the process and the fraction of the feed that bypasses the evaporator. (c) Most of the volatile ingredients that provide the taste of the concentrate are contained in the fresh juice that bypasses the evaporator. You could get more of these ingredients in the final product by evaporating to (say) 90% solids instead of 65%; you could then bypass a greater fraction of the fresh juice and thereby obtain an even better tasting product. Suggest possible drawbacks to this proposal.