Applying tomography to the cheese making process
Credit: ITOMS
Many manufacturing operations in the food, beverage, petroleum, and chemical industries (among numerous others) can be reduced to two basic elements: a pipe and a process. Accurately determining what is happening inside a pipe to monitor a production/manufacturing process in real-time was thought to be impractical for industrial use, despite being technologically feasible for many years.
Industrial Tomography Systems (ITS) is a supplier of tomography to enable industry personnel to “see inside” their “process” to obtain real-time data rendered as a cross-sectional graphic image (tomogram) displayed on a user interface.
Cheese making is one such process where tomography’s real-time monitoring ability has provided invaluable tangible benefits and insights to enhance the cheese maker’s art.
ITS was recently approached by a major European dairy manufacturer to devise a tomographical instrumentation package to analyse the curdling stage of its cheese making process.
Separating raw milk into curds and whey is an integral part of many dairy manufacturing processes, none more so than in the art of cheese making. Monitoring the curdling process (to accurately determine the curd/whey concentration) yields many benefits, beyond just maintaining product quality, to include the reduction of operational costs through more efficient energy use, among many other advantages.
The challenge was to devise a bespoke Electrical Resistance Tomography (ERT) system to meet the needs of the client and also to comply with the stringent hygiene regulations imposed by the dairy industry. The ITS ERT system also had to accommodate the client’s operational parameters which included: a temperature range of 0-120ºC, pressure of up to 10bar, and a flow velocity of approximately 0-4 ms-1; all in order to analyse in real-time a process that typically yields a curd concentration of approximately 12%.
Guided by the client’s operational demands, the task for ITS was to accurately measure the relative difference in the electrical conductivity of curds and whey to provide the elemental data upon which a tomographic image is able to be rendered.
Once gathered by an ITS sensor array, the raw data was interpreted by ITS’s v5r Windows-based software to measure the constitution of the curd/whey mixture and render a tomogram, alongside 2D Cartesian representations, in real time.
The ITS system was praised by the client for its accuracy, ease of integration, and robustness. Furthermore, the user-friendly ITS software was able to render a tomogram in real-time that allowed production staff to monitor the curdling process without specialised training or prior experience of tomography.
For more information about ITS diary food manufacturing monitoring solutions and systems, please visit www.itoms.com
