Products containing starch and gum ingredients require low shear-stress processing to preserve desired thickness. To prevent starch, gum and ingredient degradation, our design and fabrication team provides equipment selection, piping designs, and process control adjustments. Our range of engineering expertise includes successful high-viscosity shear-sensitive fluid process systems.
Recently, Placer Process assisted in developing a process system used to supply a new high-speed filling line for production of a variety of sauce flavors, textures, and ingredients. This system processes batches of products ranging from oils and water-based sauces to thick peanut butter-based sauces.
Significant cost-savings were found by putting in the extra effort to design a single dynamic system, as opposed to splitting the process into two streams, which would require twice the amount of piping and instrumentation as well as additional complexity to process and cleaning operations.
Another prominent feature to this system is that we were able to reduce the solids loss by implementing skid piping design and routing that maximizes product transfer to the filler, using components that comply with sanitary design best practices, and implementing control sequence protocols for a more efficient product push and recovery.
The major components of the system included:
- Sanitary process kettle with low sheer agitator
- Innovative positive displacement pumps for product transfer with the following advantages:
- Low suction capability
- Ingredient transfer with virtually no damage
- Pulsation free operation
- Flexible hardware and software system
- Inline maintenance capability
- Product heating accomplished through a precisely-controlled closed loop system:
- Through the process kettle’s heating jacket for product tempering
- Through a tube-in-tube heater designed for final temperature control
- Fully self-sufficient CIP with these highlights
- Hot water heating loop doubles as a CIP heater
- Sanitary rotary jet cleaning
- Instruments for CIP Validation
- Culinary steam sterilization to reduce the use of expensive chemical sanitizers
The solution implemented above comprised of a small sub-set of the range of value-added engineering, fabrication, and installation expertise Placer Process brings to every job. We invite you to contact us and find out how we can partner with you to solve your next project challenges.
