In this blog, you’ll take away:
- How impedance sensors enable real-time rinse endpoints so you can stop over washing
- How enzymatic cleaners reduce caustic tradeoffs (equipment wear, effluent headaches, employee safety risk)
- What these shifts mean for the plant: more capacity, lower water/energy use, and simpler, more confident CIP execution
The foundations of CIP
When it was invented in the mid-20th century, clean in place (CIP) solutions completely transformed the way food & beverage manufacturers operated. Now, instead of painstakingly disassembling and manually cleaning equipment, manufacturers could simplify certain processes using partially automated circuits of water and chemistry.
Ecolab invented and standardized this practice, and the results were a game changer: faster cleaning, more uptime, less need for manual labor, and, if performed correctly, superior food safety and quality.
The post-digital optimization plateau
In the decades that followed, CIP adapted to the world around it, with the biggest advancements coming through digital optimization. Digital insights, still only used to their fullest at some plants, give manufacturers increased visibility into key functions. That visibility can offer automated efficiencies on its own, and it has also helped teams spot areas for more manual improvements.
But despite these digital advancements, the core of CIP has continued to operate according to a very familiar principle: pump large quantities of very hot caustic chemistry through equipment in accordance with strict, rigid SSOPs.
A set of familiar compromises took root at the heart of CIP processes and remained there unchallenged, forcing manufacturers into trade-offs that undermine their business goals and lull them into an approach to CIP that was “good enough.”
Until now.
From precaution-based cleaning to precision-based cleaning
Impedance sensors are making rigid SSOPs a thing of the past by helping manufacturers move past their rinse steps the moment they’ve finished removing soils. | Enzymatic cleaners are providing a way to remove soils without settling for the compromises built into caustic chemistry: eroded equipment, effluent challenges, and safety concerns. |
|---|
Separately, each of these CIP innovations carry enough transformative power to change the foundation of how food and beverage manufacturers clean. Together, they’re attacking two of the biggest CIP-related challenges the industry currently faces –– incomplete CIP visibility and chemical complexity –– and offering a simplified, optimized path forward.
The end of overwashing is here: How impedance sensors dramatically boost production capacity
If CIP isn’t thoroughly removing soils, it’s not doing its job. Period. That’s why the central question of CIP is: “How can I ensure my equipment is completely clean and sanitized?”
Historically, answering that question has boiled down to conservative rinse time estimates that lead to rigid, overlong SSOPs. The logic is sound: If a rinse goes too long, that’s far superior to a food safety or product quality incident that could put customers at risk.
But these little concessions add up, and the downsides are serious:
- Overlong washes cut potential uptime every week. Add up this wasted time over the course of a year, and you’re looking at entire days spent running water through clean equipment instead of manufacturing product.
- Overlong washes also contribute to avoidable water use, putting added pressure on sustainability targets. Because CIP rinses are a major source of water consumption in many facilities, small increases in rinse time can translate into meaningful water impacts over a year.
To fully address the problem, manufacturers need to know the status of their rinses in real time. They need to know whether soils have been thoroughly removed and whether it’s safe to move on to the next CIP step.
In other words, they need advanced sensors that give them a new level of visibility into each CIP cycle. But until recently, sensor technology couldn’t quite rise to the occasion.
The limitations of conductivity sensors
Conductivity sensors have long been integral to CIP. By measuring how easily electrical currents pass through a fluid, these sensors create a portrait of that fluid’s ionic content. In food and beverage manufacturing contexts, using conductive chemistries gives plant supervisors visibility into the real-time concentration of caustic cleaners in their process water, which can help prevent that concentration from getting too low or too high.
What conductivity sensors have a hard time measuring, however, is organic matter –– the proteins, fats, and residues being flushed out during rinse cycles. Conductivity sensors can’t account for these soils, which makes them a bad fit for determining whether the chemistry it’s measuring has effectively gotten rid of soils.
The limitations of turbidity sensors
In some applications, turbidity sensors offer a way around this problem. Turbidity sensors use optical analysis to determine the makeup of fluids, essentially shining a light through process water and scanning for suspended solids. In certain contexts (like many dairy plants and home dishwashers), this technology can prove massively useful in determining how many soil particulates are left in a fluid.
But the problem with turbidity sensors is that they aren’t great at telling the difference between different types of visual “obstructions.” For examples, bubbles that form in the turbulent flow of a CIP wash can refract sensor lights and read as pieces of soil. In the case of a turbulent CIP flow, turbidity sensors risk flagging a completely normal aspect of a clean rinse as a sign of continuing soil removal, preventing operators from knowing when their rinses are complete. In beverage and brewing contexts, these false readings create unreasonable room for error.
Bottom line: Conductivity and turbidity sensors can play an important role in food and beverage operations, but they can’t provide the consistent, accurate readings (across different applications) that manufacturers require for real-time soil load data.
How impedance sensors help you see more
Impedance sensors equip food and beverage with more information, which makes them more useful in more situations.
Like conductivity sensors, impedance sensors work by shooting an electrical current through process water. But unlike conductivity sensors, impedance sensors measure more than the ionic makeup of that water.
Impedance sensors measure:
- Conductivity (the ability of a fluid to transfer charge)
- Capacitance (the ability of a fluid to hold charge)
- Temperature (the degree of thermal energy present in a fluid, which can influence the above two parameters)
The addition of capacitance is key here. Measuring for capacitance allows impedance sensors to distinguish between organic soils and non-soil elements (like bubbles), which makes it possible to “filter out” irrelevant information and generate an accurate soil load reading in a wide variety of CIP contexts:
Pre-rinse | Yes |
Alkaline wash | |
Alkaline rinse | Yes |
Acid wash | |
|---|---|
Acid rinse | Yes |
Flavor rinse | Yes |
No more false readings. No more mistaking bubbles for soils. Just absolute, real-time clarity on whether your CIP rinses have completed their work.
How impedance monitoring works
Impedance monitoring requires two impedance sensors –– one that measures rinsewater as it enters CIP lines and a second sensor that measures rinsewater immediately after it finishes the CIP rinse. The first reading creates a “fingerprint” of the fluid’s properties based on its conductivity, capacitance and temperature readings.
