FDBusiness.com

Italian consortium adopts Russell Finex technology to help process animal fats

London – New applications for animal fats have prompted Consorzio Latterie Virgilio – an Italian consortium associated with 70 dairies and over 2,000 farmers – to expand its product range which was mainly based on dairy products.

Sourcing fat from its slaughter plant, the company sought to produce two key animal fat by-products – an animal fat spread – an Italian delicacy – and biodiesel.

Production required a new processing line to be built, and therefore Virgilio approached a well known engineering house, which proposed a system that required the meat fat to be minced before being steam heated into a liquid form at just under 100°C.

As the meat fat contains skins and cartilages that are difficult to break down, the liquid product is then fed to a filtration system to remove any oversize contamination. The engineering house recommended the self-cleaning Russell Eco filter to Virgilio for this stage of the process.

The Russell Finex filter is designed to ensures that material passes through the filter screen whilst the screen is automatically cleaned using a rotating wiper inside the element. The wiper system works on a continuous basis, cleaning the filter element surface at all times, providing a consistent throughput rate and differential pressure.

The units were customised to meet the exact requirements of the application. As the filter was required to remove oversize above 100 micron which is then returned to the pulveriser for rework, the oversize outlet was reduced in size from 2” to 1” and attached to a pump. The pump constantly feeds the oversize back into the main line.

Due to the nature of the product being processed, the pipework needed to be cleaned on a regular basis. Therefore, a second Russell Eco filter was supplied, acting as a clean-in-place system circulating water with cleaning solution around the pipework.