Dairy Processing - May/June 2024 - 45

reducing downtime. Drum motors drive modular profiled belts
without using sprockets, eliminating areas where byproducts
accumulate, requiring less time and water for cleaning, further
mitigating downtime. The company's founder and president,
Alex Kanaris, said that while the drum motor's all-enclosed
design is the most hygienic conveyor belt drive, many
processors aren't accustomed to seeing a conveyor without
an external motor. The company is working to change this
paradigm of thinking.
Proper training of employees is critically important, and
Olson said training should involve not only the employees
who are on hand when a piece of equipment is installed, but
also the employees that come on board later to work with the
equipment.
" We're currently focusing on building out a training
program that our customers can have on hand when new
employees come on or the equipment moves throughout the
facility and touches different hands, " Olson said.
READING THE SITUATION
of the equipment and causing equipment issues.
Designing a process that reduces the need for cleaning
is one of the biggest ways companies can optimize uptime,
said Martin Skanderby, senior sales manager with GEA.
To that end, GEA considers what temperatures can be
used in processes to optimize runtime. After all, using high
temperatures can kill unwanted bacteria but also damage
products and create chemical or technical scaling on the
equipment at the same time. Overall, GEA designs equipment
and processes to prevent the buildup of biofilm that can
harbor bacteria.
" In your planning of cleaning, have a predictable
overall process setup, meaning not stretching the process
characteristics to the limits and not stretching the runtimes to
the limits as there will sooner or later be sudden stops, which
will cause unpredictable cleaning, " Skanderby said.
GEA offers a spray dryer that allows for one part of the
equipment to be out for cleaning while still running with
the remaining parts, and Skanderby said this allows for
processing of products to continue while still performing
routine cleaning.
Van der Graaf is a manufacturer of drum motors, which
are conveyor belt drives with all driving components enclosed
and protected inside the drum. These drives are engineered to
operate continuously for 80,000 hours without maintenance,
Instruments that provide key data on machine health are
critical in knowing when maintenance will be needed.
Krohne, Beverly, Mass., offers Coriolis mass flowmeters
that provide data on mass and volumetric flow along with
density of the product and temperature readings. The
meters send that information to the control system to create
a whole picture of what is happening, said Neil Stringer,
sales manager.
Paying special attention to machine health during
pasteurization is also important, as it can be a somewhat
violent process that causes machines to shake and vibrate.
Consequently, Stringer said running pasteurizers correctly
with the right instrumentation is important for uptime.
With the growth of extended shelf-life products and their
use of ultra-high temperature processes, more care must
be taken to prevent damaging protein and fat during the
pasteurization process.
Alfa Laval offers a condition monitoring system that
analyzes temperatures and vibrations from equipment like
pumps to reduce unplanned maintenance, and Russell Jones,
the company's commercial sales manager for pumps, said
monitoring vibrations is key to understanding equipment
health. The company then takes data from this monitoring and
makes it actionable for processors.
" We have launched a way to gather data into the cloud,
where we can now interface with the data, analyze it and send
back to our customers some very simple reports that are very
usable, and hopefully timely, so they can do some planned
downtime to avoid unplanned downtime, " Jones said.
With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), these reports
DAIRYPROCESSING.COM | MAY-JUN 2024 45
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