Anderson-Negele turbidity sensors: Reduce Product Waste and Waste Management Costs in your Dairy Plant

 

If you’re still using sight glass, time control, or volume acquisition for Phase Separation or Interface Detection at your dairy, you’re losing money. Product waste is a reality in any dairy, but with the continually shrinking profit margins you face year after year, the need to reduce product waste is also a reality.

How You Lose Money:

• Unnecessary BOD fines for excess solids in wastewater.
• Excess product loss through inefficient CIP Monitoring.
• Excess product loss when switching media.
• Increases in your water bill by using far more water than needed.
• And, added cost due to undetected failure of cooling circuits.

Turbidity is the phenomenon whereby a specific portion of a light beam passing through a liquid medium is reflected by undissolved particles. The sensor measures the light that is reflected by these particles to determine their concentration in the liquid. Purified water would have close to zero undissolved particles, while ice cream mix has a high concentration of undissolved particles.

An inline turbidity sensor (Anderson-Negele ITM-51) is installed at leverage points in the dairy product handling process to facilitate instant detection of the following phase changes:

• Product-to-Product
• Product-to-Water
• Water to Cleaning Agent

 

The Benefits of the Anderson-Negele ITM-51 Turbidity Sensor in your Dairy Plant:

Using the Anderson-Negele Instrument ITM-51, even minor changes to the dairy product can be detected and acted upon by the system – automatically and instantly.

Your personnel and systems can be in total control and Instrument outputs are automatically recorded for quality control records. The stainless-steel sensor resists corrosion, and the highly resistant sapphire glass optics provides incredible precision and a lifetime of five years or more.

Overall, you’ll see:

• Improved product quality
• Quicker product changeovers
• Product waste reduction
• Reduced sewage and water usage costs
• Lower BOD fees
• Less chemical use
• Enhanced process availability and reduced water consumption from cleaning efficiency
• Improved process control
• A return on your minimal investment in months or weeks

The improvement oversight, time-control, or volume acquisition is immediate and consistent.

The principles of operation of the ITM-51 turbidity sensor:

• An infra-red LED emits light into media through the sapphire lens
• The receiver measures the amount of light reflected by particles suspended in the media
• It generates a signal that is proportional to the number of particles. This is the relative turbidity

The turbidity sensor allows instant and accurate monitoring of product changeovers or CIP programs. During the phase separation of the media or during the start-up and emptying of the process, the media must be differentiated. The turbidity sensor can detect the instant a liquid media reaches a pre-defined specification, automatically switching media to its appropriate container.