Minimization of water and chemical usage in the cleaning in place process of a milk pasteurization plant

Cleaning in place (CIP) is a method of cleaning inner surfaces of piping, vessel, equipment, and associated fitting with disassembly. Although, the CIP processes have been studied continually to improve efficiency for chemical and water consumption, the real conventional plant operations of this process still have been considered as a large amount of consumption. The objectives of this work are to study process behaviors and to find out the optimal draining ratio of the CIP cleaning chemicals in a pasteurized milk plant. To achieve these, mathematical models of the CIP process have been developed and validated by the actual process data. With these models, simulation study has been carried out to describe the dynamic behaviors of the process with respect to the concentrations and contaminations in CIP cleaning chemicals. The optimization problem has been formulated and solved using written programs based on MATLAB application program.