A special video on the road today, to explain how to calculate the heating and cooling load, that is the amount of thermal energy to be added or removed to a certain production process in order to achieve a required temperature regulation. In this case we face the problem applied to the heating or cooling load for a thermoregulating unit on a pharmaceutical reactor.
There is a wide range of machinery and equipments in use in the pharma and chemical industry, and the calculation method of the heating and cooling load depends on the kind of machine employed.

Anyway, the most common way is to consider the volume of the reactor to be thermoregulated, and the physical properties of the kind of product processed, in particular its specific weight and specific heat capacity. Following, the heating and cooling curves required by the application must be known, that is the starting and final temperatures to be reached, and the time frame required to complete the heating and cooling cycles of the products.

At this point the calculation is obtained with a simple formula, multiplying the volume of the product x specific weight x specific heat capacity, multiplied x the temperature change, and all divided by the time unit. The resulting are the kcal, or kw/h required to heat or cool the product. The formula must then be applied to all the up and down temperature ramps, to find out the most challenging one that will serve as base for the correct sizing of the thermoregulating unit.

Another case is represented by the distillation of products. In this case the reference heat or cooling load to determine the size of the unit is obtained, in addition to the temperature ramps calculation, by another one related to the distillation process, multiplying the amount of kgs/hour of distilled product x the latent heat of vaporization.