Abstract
An efficient enhancement of the carbonation rate in the bottle filling stage can substantially increase the production in beverage industries. The bottle filling system currently used in most of the manufacturers can still be improved for a better performance of carbonation by designing the injection tube system. This paper reports on an experimental and numerical mass transfer modeling that can simulate the dissolution process of gaseous carbon dioxide into aqueous water in the bottle filler system. In order to establish the operating characteristics of the bottle filler system, an ordinary tap water and pure carbon dioxide were used as the liquid-gas system. The two-phase numerical modeling was developed that can serve as a framework for the continuous improvement of the design of the carbonation process in the bottle filler system. For an optimal design of CO2 injection tube and flow conditions, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach is one of the most power tools. However, since only limited experimental data are available in the open literature to verify the computational results, an experiment study was performed to obtain measurements of CO2 level, temperature, and pressure during the carbonation process in the bottle filled with liquid. Both experimental and numerical studies of various flow condition and different sizes of injection tube are presented in this paper.