Christian Grossenbacher
With the end of summer and the beginning of fall comes football season here in the U.S. And what better way to start the season than a good success story about quality beer production.
In a Flow Control Magazine article, Coriolis Meters Keep the Beer Flowing, Emerson’s Christian Grossenbacher shares how a Belgium brewery installs the world’s first beer pipeline with critical flow measurements to assure quality.
Christian opened highlighting a challenge this brewery faced:
A well-known and loved brewery, located in the center of historic Bruges for six generations, purchased a nearby bottling facility outside of town to meet increased production demands from soaring beer sales. However, they did not want to move the brewing facilities, nor did they want to transport beer in tankers through the busy town center, which would add to the traffic load on the old streets, as well as the expenses of either renting or owning the tankers, maintaining them and paying drivers.
A novel solution:
…the world’s first beer pipeline, was devised, but it required special equipment to make it work and keep the quality of the beer consistent. By installing underground piping that transported the beer from the brewery to the bottling plant 3.2 kilometers away, the transportation issue was solved.
Critical for this pipeline was a:
…meter to accurately measure flow, volume and temperature, while monitoring for periods of aeration that is common in the process of beer transportation and movement…
While magnetic flowmeters are commonly used in beer production flow measurements, in this case the pipeline had:
…beer flowing under the streets, water and cleaning solution used to periodically clean the pipes had to be measured, which led the brewery to select a Coriolis meter as the preferred technology.
Micro Motion Coriolis flow measurement technology was important with:
…built-in self-calibrating diagnostics. In this case, an onboard diagnostic tool — or meter verification tool — alerts the plant manager to changes in the process and in meter performance before the quality of the beer is affected.
Another key technology for this application was advanced phase measurement.
It can both identify and quantify excess gas and allow accurate measurement continuously without the threat of process upsets. Advanced phase measurement gives clear insight into what is happening in the lines at any time, which reduces the need for time-consuming manual sampling and minimizes discrepancies in the transferred product or clean-in-place fluids.
Read the article for more as Christian explains the importance of accurate measure degrees Plato, temperature and nutrient density as well as the success in building and operating the world first beer pipeline.
You can connect and interact with other food & beverage industry and flow experts in the Food and Beverage and Measurement Instrumentation groups in the Emerson Exchange 365 community and/or at the September 23-27 Emerson Exchange conference in Nashville.
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