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Use the Right Instrumentation to Improve Batch Manufacturing

josh friesz — Mon, 30 Mar 2020 20:35:53 GMT

There’s an old management saying: You can’t control what you can’t measure. This certainly applies in food and beverage manufacturing.

Manufacturers in every industry want control and consistency in their processes. Ideally, for food & beverage companies, this applies to ingredients and processing. Unfortunately, inconsistencies of ingredients are common, so processing must be adjusted to accommodate these differences, and effective instrumentation becomes a very critical tool in this effort. Working in this environment is the main point of our article at Food Engineering Online Mar 2020 article, Use the Right Instrumentation to Improve Batch Manufacturing.

Consistency relates to both the product itself and the manufacturing process. Whether beer or a headache remedy, customers want a given product to be the same every time they purchase it. Manufacturers want every batch to turn out the same way as well. When the same ingredients are mixed in the same proportions and processed the same way, the effort should yield the same product. Yet, complications often emerge due to lack of consistency of ingredients combined with the difficulty of maintaining effective process control.

There’s the key: you can’t always control the ingredients, so you must be able to control the process to compensate for the ingredient inconsistencies. Intentionality is the driver, with no guesswork.

Achieving consistency in a manufacturing environment, particularly a hygienic environment, requires effective instrumentation since something that cannot be measured cannot be controlled. Using the previous example, if the recipe calls for heating a batch of product to 85 degrees Celsius, plus or minus 2 degrees, and holding for some period, operators must have accurate and reliable instrumentation to know when that temperature has been reached and how to maintain it in the tolerance band. Too high of a temperature wastes energy and could overheat the mixture. An excessively low temperature may result in an incomplete reaction or inadequate microbial control.

Pressure and temperature instrumentation applications show up again and again in these environments for many reasons. Pressure transmitters deserve special consideration since they receive treatment which can cause accuracy problems over time.

Within the hygienic industries, instability becomes a particular problem. Instrumentation manufacturers publish a stability specification, but it does not always consider the hard treatment common to this environment. Pressure transmitters subjected to the rapid and drastic temperature changes common to CIP and SIP procedures can lose their stability and allow significant reading displacement. Some users simply accept drift over time as a fact of life that must be controlled with frequent calibrations. This does not have to be the case, however, because available instruments can maintain stability with less than 0.2% drift per year even in these difficult applications, batch after batch, cleaning cycle after cleaning cycle.

This kind of problem can be avoided by using transmitters designed for just this kind of application. Emerson’s Rosemount 3051HT Hygienic Pressure Transmitter can withstand the hard treatment, delivering batch repeatability up to ±0.02% upper range limit for 60 batches with five-year stability.

The article also discusses critical capabilities of temperature transmitters, such as the Rosemount 327T Temperature Transmitter, which features drift monitoring diagnostics and sensor backup technology to provide layers of safety to ensure your food and beverage operations are in specification.

So, ask yourself, how much control do you have in your processes:

Are there areas where you aren’t sure what is happening?
Is instrumentation dependable so you can count on it to help?
Do transmitters have a long and stable lifespan, or to they demand frequent re-calibration or replacement?

Let us know where your production pain points are, and you may find others with the same struggles. You can find more information like this and meet with other people looking at the same kinds of situations in the Emerson Exchange 365 community. It’s a place where you can communicate and exchange information with experts and peers in all sorts of industries around the world. Look for the Food & Beverage Groups and other specialty areas for suggestions and answers.

Advanced Instrumentation Technologies Provide Versatility in Food and Beverage Applications

Melissa Stiegler — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 20:12:49 GMT

Anyone who has ever worked in the food processing industry quickly learns the importance of proper equipment sanitation. Everything has to be cleanable positively, quickly and without a lot of fuss. Nooks and crannies able to provide a breeding ground for dust and bugs have to be designed out of individual pieces and assemblies, including process instruments.

Those critical design elements to support cleanability have to come first when selecting instrumentation for these applications, which limits the choices available to engineers. Joshua Friesz examines this conundrum in an August 2019 Food Engineering posting titled Advanced Instrumentation Technologies Provide Versatility in Food and Beverage Applications. He points out that advanced instrumentation capabilities used in conventional industries aren’t always available in hygienic instruments, but the situation is changing for the better.

While food and beverage plants typically don’t have all the complex processes or automation technology of heavier process industries, there are still many ways where even simple advances can provide numerous benefits. Case in point: One brewery located near Emerson’s offices in Minnesota uses a differential pressure transmitter primarily to measure level in its brew tanks, but it also determined that data from this transmitter could tell them much more than just the volume of water.

He explains how the brewery was able to characterize different parts of the process by switching from a manual gauge and a clipboard to a more sophisticated DP transmitter coupled to a data recorder. This was possible because the transmitter necessary to do the job was available with an appropriate configuration. The growth in this part of the industry has brought a wide range of improvements.

The technological developments of electronics in the last 20 years have provided opportunities for instrumentation suppliers to add many new condition and process diagnostics to instruments. Condition diagnostics relate to signal gathering and processing functions, and can identify problems such as an internal component failure or power and grounding issues. The whole electrical loop can be monitored by the transmitter to detect and warn of any issues capable of affecting the 4-20 mA signal. Process diagnostics detect things happening outside of the instrument such as changes in process noise or clogging impulse lines. These capabilities have been available, to varying degrees, in conventional instruments for many years and they are moving into hygienic designs as well.

Emerson has been working on applying technologies developed in heavier process industries to the more specialized need of food and beverage producers. The goal is to optimize product designs to deliver the right mix of technical capabilities in a hygienic form factor using communication protocols common to the industry. For example:

The compact Rosemount 326P pressure transmitter is designed specifically for food and beverage applications. While it doesn’t feature the same performance specifications as the Rosemount 3051HT, it still handles pressure and temperature limits common to these applications and can also withstand regular CIP/SIP cycles. A modular arrangement enables it to be outfitted with any of up to nine different process connection styles. It communicates via a 4-20 mA current loop, augmented with IO-Link for configuration and diagnostics, and includes a local display and programming via buttons.

This is just one of the specialized instruments for food and beverage applications. The family also includes the Rosemount 326T Temperature Transmitter, the Rosemount 326L Level Transmitter Guided Wave Radar and others. They’re all designed to provide sophisticated capabilities in a hygienic but flexible package.

You can find more information like this and meet with other people looking at the same kinds of situations in the Emerson Exchange365 community. It’s a place where you can communicate and exchange information with experts and peers in all sorts of industries around the world. Look for the Food & Beverage and Life Sciences Groups and other specialty areas for suggestions and answers.

LINK: Optimize Your CIP Process with Conductivity Sensors

josh friesz — Wed, 31 Oct 2018 21:00:46 GMT

CIP processes are being run by Food &Beverage facilities all over the world to keep their systems clean. In this video, Optimize Your CIP Process with Conductivity Sensors, I explain how conductivity sensors can help you optimize your CIP process. Questions or Comments? Reply below the video in the Analytical forum post.

Alamo Beer Automates Specific Gravity over the Cloud, Improves Throughput

Emerson Exchange News — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 19:33:27 GMT

Like many breweries looking to excel in a highly competitive market, Alamo Beer Co. was faced with a production conundrum: do more with less while still ensuring the quality of its products.

Tanks and real estate are expensive. Reliable labor is hard to find and even harder to keep. Time is limited, and the brewing process is complex and labor intensive. Take fermentation, for example. Brewers need precise control of the temperature of the beer in their tanks for fermentation to be successful but finding that “sweet spot” can be difficult. Lagers and ales require different settings, and even the same variety of beer can vary in its performance, batch to batch. If the slightest aspect is off, the quality of the product can be affected – resulting in bad batches that cost time and money. What’s more, breweries are increasingly changing recipes to keep up with consumer demand, adding greater complexity to their operations.

Considering those obstacles, delivering more quality beer with fewer tanks doesn’t seem realistic – but that’s exactly what Alamo Beer is learning to do, thanks to enhanced automation of its San Antonio brewery. In fact, Alamo Beer’s use of automation has shown that a 20 percent increase in beer production per brewing cycle is possible after implementing a system of sensors and transmitters from Emerson that provide real-time measurement of density and enable improved temperature control of its fermenters.

In addition to increasing throughput, reliability and quality, these technologies offer another significant benefit: a quick return on investment. How quick? Edwards estimates that a brewery with a 90-barrel fermenter can achieve ROI in nine months or less – and that ROI decreases as the fermenter size increases. And for smaller breweries, the cost of a system like this is less than the single annual cost of a full-time brewer.

So, what’s the secret behind Alamo Beer’s improved production? Simply put, Alamo’s brewers can now enter a stepped fermentation profile into their system and know that the temperature changes will happen at the exact moment necessary for good beer to be made as quickly as possible. This enables them to more swiftly move product through the production process, freeing up valuable real estate and available resources for further experimentation and increased production.

This is in stark contrast to the standard operating procedures of many breweries where brewers rely on unreliable manual density tests and low-accuracy temperature control for each batch to control and check the progress of fermentation. These tests take time and offer limited insight into what’s happening with the batch. For example, density is typically measured every couple of days and can take up to 30 minutes for each sample.

By shifting from manual settings to automated readings, brewers have access to continuous data so that they can make their adjustments faster, or even automatically, and know exactly when the beer is finished. Early estimates show Alamo Beer is saving at least three hours of labor per batch. This speeds up production by anywhere from hours to days, depending on the batch. For example, using non-contacting radar, two pressure transmitters, and a temperature transmitter, specific gravity of wort can be calculated accurately and in real time as it becomes beer in a fermenter.

But as any brewer knows, it’s not just about throughput; it’s about quality – and Alamo Beer also has leveraged Emerson technologies to ensure it maintains the product quality for which its brand is known.

Utilizing magnetic flowmeters, Alamo Beer is improving batch consistency by more accurately determining yeast transfer volume – a key factor in beer quality and finishing time. Flowmeters also help prevent finished beer from being wasted when yeast is transferred from one tank to another or from the fermenter to the brite tank, and they enable breweries to more accurately report production to save on taxes.

In addition, a facility’s cleaning processes are made more efficient with flowmeters that deliver only the amounts of cleaning solutions necessary to ensure cleaning efficacy. This enables breweries to use less water, shorten cleaning times and produce less waste. Alamo Beer also has incorporated pH and dissolved oxygen (DO) sensors to ensure batch recipe consistency and quickly identify bad batches early in the production process before they are transferred to fermenters, slowing production.

Learn more about Emerson Fluid Automation for craft brewers here.

LINK: Optimize your Brewing Operations with Inline Flow Measurement

@Tom Belling — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 19:36:04 GMT

Intelligent beverage producers are turning to Automation Solutions providers to optimize their brewing and production processes. Checkout this video, Optimize your Brewing Operations with Inline Flow Measurement, where I explain how inline flow measurement can help brewers improve efficiency and guarantee product quality. Questions or Comments? Reply below in the video thread.

LINK: Optimizing Spirit Operations

Stephane — Fri, 03 Nov 2017 19:40:32 GMT

The Spirit industry is changing as consumers are getting more product savvy; they want more variety without the sacrifice of quality. Check out this video, Optimizing Spirit Operations to learn more about how Food & Beverage operations are using automated solutions to optimize their production and ensure product quality.

LINK: How to Optimize Dairy Operations & Eliminate Product Waste

@Tom Belling — Fri, 20 Oct 2017 15:35:09 GMT

The vast majority of dairy producers lose 1 - 2 % of their product each day. How is this impacting your bottom line? Producers are now using automation solutions to help them optimize their flow measurements and eliminate product waste. Check out this video in the Flow group in EE365, where I explain more about mass balance, improving separator ratios and more: How to Optimize Dairy Operations & Eliminate Product Waste.

Taking the guesswork out of solids measurement

ahessel — Thu, 25 Sep 2014 14:11:16 GMT

The new Rosemount 5708 3D Solids Scanner is the only system available that provides continuous level and measured volume data for solids applications. More information about this truly unique product is available here: http://bit.ly/RMT3DSolids

...or come and see for yourself at the Emerson Exchange exhibit (6-8^th October) where we will feature a full display of the product on the level booth!

Content Based Analysis during PAS modernization

Cody Long — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 16:36:01 GMT

Are there any examples of where analytics were applied to a legacy PAS configuration prior to modernization? Specifically, was the legacy configuration migrated via bruteforce or was an effort made to understand the content of the configuration? Were similar loops identified? Were custom loops identified? I am seeking input as to what analysis steps are taken to translate a legacy configuration to DeltaV.

Flowmeter issues

Billy — Mon, 10 Mar 2014 15:07:17 GMT

We have several 2700 series Coriolis Flowmeters measuring Sucrose, and Palm oil,. Operations wants them field calibrated. Does anyone have a set of guidelines to get me headed in the right direction? They have been in place about 1 1/2 years and noone has developed a procedure for checking them