Case Study

SWEDISH DAIRY ENSURES A HIGH LEVEL OF PRODUCT QUALITY BY INSTALLING A SPIRAX SARCO CLEAN STEAM GENERATOR

Swedish Dairy

The Issue:

Whilst steam is still the most efficient and clean method of applying heat to many food and beverage process applications, care must be taken to ensure that all steam systems are correctly designed, installed and maintained. This guarantees high quality steam is delivered to the point of use.

When plant steam is used in direct contact with the process, for example, UHT milk, contamination can occur from a number of sources; e.g. boiler chemicals, particulates in the pipeline and cross contamination from other applications such as clean-in-place (CIP). Therefore, correct measures must be adopted to measure the quality of the steam entering the process.

The benefit of using steam in this way is that the product is quickly brought up to sterilisation temperature, ensuring that product quality and taste is maintained to the highest standard. In addition to being used in direct contact with the product, steam is also extensively used to sterilise areas such as process lines, filling heads and clean air filters. It is essential that any steam supplied to process applications should be of the correct standard and not compromise the quality of the product in any way.

Our customer was aware of all these issues and wanted to assess any potential risk of contamination in their process.

The Solution:

For the particular process application in question, steam was being directly injected into the product itself and so the customer wanted to guarantee the quality of steam entering their process. Therefore, we worked with the customer to identify what the potential risks were and advised them how these risks could be reduced.

We identified that by supplying the process with steam generated by an independent clean steam generator and using a higher quality water supply, the customer will be able to eliminate the potential risk of contamination from boiler chemicals, particulates and CIP applications. As a result, we were engaged to design, specify, supply and commission a Spirax Sarco clean steam generator for their new process line. 

The result:

By installing the clean steam generator, the customer is now able to continuously run their process safe in the knowledge that product quality will not be compromised as a result of poor quality steam.