State-of-the-art cleaning methods To meet today’s strict
hygienic requirements, processing plants for the Food & Dairy industry must satisfy the highest design standards to ensure:
- long production time and short downtime for cleaning
- correct cleaning of all product contacted surfaces and a design that leaves no hollow spaces or sharp corners.
All flowsheet animations are available in the GEA Niro download area.
Cleaning in Place (CIP) cleaning of all plant components in contact with the liquid product is an easy and well-known procedure. However, by smart design solutions in the evaporator and feed system for the spray dryer, GEA Niro has optimized cleaning time and the manpower needed to an absolute minimum. The evaporator and dryer feed system is typically cleaned every 20 h for dairy products.
CIP cleaning of all plant components in contact with dry product is quite another matter. It is difficult and it takes time. GEA Niro has designed their spray drying plants to avoid powder deposits or at least minimize them, as they are the main reason for a total wet CIP cleaning which typically takes 12-14 hours depending on the number of CIP tanks and manpower allocated for a change-over from production to cleaning mode and back again.
The CIP system as supplied by GEA Niro involves a powerful Toftejorg Tank Cleaner for the drying chamber. This cleaning device rotates by the flow of the cleaning liquid, i.e. by means of four nozzles and is sprayed at high pressure onto the chamber surface. Other plant components such as dust-loaded air ducts, cyclones,
VIBRO-FLUIDIZER™, sieve, and the CIP-able
SANICIP™ bag filter are cleaned by integrated
CIP nozzles welded on to the plant components together with their associated pipe work and instrumentation. The program software includes the flexibility to alter and adapt CIP sequences and time according to experience and need when new products are processed.