FDBusiness.com

Johnny Bonke, Application Development Manager from GEA, will be taking part in the IDF Parallel Symposia in Dublin on Monday, 11 April 2016 organized by the International Dairy Federation. Johnny will present at the Concentrated Dried Milk Products Symposium and will focus on the use of Advanced Process Control (APC) in the dairy powder industry to monitor and control critical powder parameters during the drying process.

During his presentation, Johnny will explain the latest developments from GEA for inline sensor technology. Many processors of food powders will already be familiar with the GEA’s trusted POWDEREYE™ sensors that have led the market for some years by providing accurate inline analysis of the bulk density and moisture content of powders. Today, however, this technology has been significantly enhanced to allow the measurement of a wider range of product-quality parameters and for the automatic control of the drying equipment itself.

Johnny Bonke, Application Development Manager at GEA.

The latest POWDEREYE™ sensors, as well as providing moisture and bulk density analysis, also transmit data relating to temperature and humidity as well as product-quality parameters such as powder color, particle size distribution and the proportion of scorched particles present. The system then provides this information directly to the operators for the necessary adjustments to be made to the dryer, or uses an intelligent algorithm to instruct the GEA DRYCONTROL™ Model Predictive Control (MPC) system to make those adjustments automatically.

The combination of POWDEREYE™ with MPC provides much tighter quality control for processors. Better control keeps more product within specification and so reduces the need for re-blending, lowers energy consumption, avoids fouling and reduces the need for Cleaning in Place (CIP) thereby reducing both downtime and the use of cleaning chemicals.

The new POWDEREYE™ sensors can be supplied with new installations or retrofitted to existing powder drying plants.