Simulation of a Vacuum Evaporator for Propolis Production

Propolis is a matter produced by honey bees. Propolis production is carried out through extraction with ethanol and dilution with water. In order to increase the propolis purity, ethanol and water need to be removed in the final product by vacuum evaporation. The evaporation process that has been utilized so far has not been able to regenerate ethanol properly and the propolis production capacity is yet in small amounts, so an optimization of evaporation process needs to be performed to increase the propolis production. The purpose of this study is to obtain an optimum condition of a vacuum extraction for propolis production. The method used is the numerical simulation of the extraction process that has been modeled mathematically. The model consists of mass balance, energy balance and momentum balance. The simulation results for the evaporator of 0.35 m in diameter and 0.18 m in fluid height show that the optimum condition is at 343 K and 5×10^-3 atm with the evaporation time being about 13 hours.