Small Process Plant

Production process plants operate at thousands of litres per hour - anything from 2,000 litres to 20,000 litres per hour. This means a test batch is expensive in terms of time on production plant and in usage of ingredients. Just testing an idea is a huge risk on production plant if there is an unforeseen problem. Small scale plant is useful to test a wide range of ideas away from the pressure of production and on manageable batch size. The plant is more robust than larger scale plant and can run outside normal production operating parameters. Changes to process conditions can be quickly applied.

Description of Mini Process Plant

Arkarius has a bespoke heating and cooling plant running at 1 litre per minute. Batch size is 2-5 litres and this gives sufficient to taste and assess. This flexible heating plant can be configured for UHT processing, typically 140°C holding for 4 seconds or for pasteurisation 72-95°C holding for 15 seconds. A 60 second holding tube is also available for thermising milk before culturing yoghurt. The mini plant uses indirect heating to achieve the required process temperature. Product is pumped into coils of 6mm internal diameter pipe which are held in cylindrical chambers. There are 2 heating sections and 3 cooling sections.

A typical UHT process is

Preheat to 80°C
Homogenise 2000/500 psi (130/30 bar)
Heat to 140°C
Hold for 4 seconds
1st stage cool
(optional position for homogenisation)
2nd stage cool
Final cool

After processing product is hand filled into bottles. Normally for evaluation of flavour, colour and texture the bottles would be clean but non sterile and processed samples would need to be stored at chill (4°C) with a shelf life of up to 10 days. Where samples are needed for storage testing over a longer period of time pre sterilised containers can be filled in a clean air cabinet. This does not guarantee sterility but around 50% of packed samples are sterile. This is very much a first stage evaluation to minimise costs. These are suitable for technical evaluation but not for market research. There is a limit as to what can be achieved at a small scale.

Typical time temperature graphs are

Time Temperature plot of Pasteurisation on Mini Plant:

Time Temperature plot of UHT in Mini Plant: