Belgian cheesmaker wins “Best Practice in Process” award!

Cheesemaker fabrelac from Belgium has won this years’ ITM award “Best Practice in Process” for an automation project to continuously monitor and control the product composition.

Variations in the composition are a constant challenge for anyone working with natural products such as milk, which has large fluctuations in the levels of fats and proteins. To gain an advanced form of process control, fabrelac was looking for an inline and continuous measuring solution to monitor and control the product composition.

Günter Pinkowski, Vice President Marketing KROHNE, and Jos Peters, Managing director fabrelac, with the ITM award “Best Practice in Process”

The Bree-based cheesemaker contacted Krohne, and after a pilot project to monitor the quality of the raw product with OPTIQUAD-M 4050 W proved successful, fabrelac decided to equip production streams with the inline analysis system: in total, fabrelac now uses 10 OPTIQUAD-M systems to monitor and control the product composition and one OPTIQUAD-WW 4050 W to measure the Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) in the waste water. fabrelac decided to lease the systems from KROHNE, which is a special financing option available for OPTIQUAD systems.

The ITM jury appreciated the innovative automation approach of fabrelac, not only because of the advanced form of process control and the results achieved, but also because the challenge was on both sides: to make this application possible, fabrelac and KROHNE worked closely together to identify the relevant parameters for each application and make them available within the process control system. By using the inline analyzers, the company manages to maintain a high product quality and constant composition, documented through all process stages, while increasing automation level.

OPTIQUAD-M 4050 W is a spectroscopic analysis system for the continuous in line measurement of protein, fat, lactose and total solids in the production of milk-based products including cheese. It uses up to 12 wavelengths (UV/VIS/NIR/IR - from 200 to 4000 nm) and combines up to four optical principles (transmission, scattering, fluorescence and refraction). The underlying calibration is calculated automatically from reference data specific to the application.

Based on the same functional principle, OPTIQUAD-WW 4050 W is a spectroscopic analysis system for the continuous in line measurement of chemical oxygen demand (COD) in the wastewater flow of dairies or cheese factories.

• Krohne products are marketed in Ireland by DWN Instrumentation.