The new technology, launched earlier this year has been widely adopted, especially by producers of milk-based beverages as it significantly reduces energy, equipment and maintenance costs for beverage processing plants. It is particularly suitable for single or multi-pass mixing of dissolvable powders up to 400cP. This makes Inline Formula ideal for applications such as milk recombination, juice concentration, beverage preparation, the manufacture of base slurries and the production of the increasingly popular liquid breakfast.
Inline Formula is a new design of mixing rota developed not only to create the necessary sheering force to mix the product, but also to develop sufficient centrifugal pressure to pump the product to the storage silos without the need of a separate centrifugal pump. This is achieved by splitting the vanes of the rota around the stator to create the necessary external pressure.
The new development offers a number of benefits over current technology. Firstly, eliminating the need for a separate centrifugal pump and limiting the need for further down-stream processing immediately reduces capital, installation and maintenance costs. Secondly, the increased pressure means that storage silos can be re-circulated more quickly reducing batch processing time. Finally, tests have proven that the new system is significantly more efficient than existing systems, allowing the use of less powerful motors (45kW) thereby cutting power usage by up to 15%.
GEA Liquid Processing area sales manager Claus Patscheider said: “The Inline Formula is the perfect technology for producing this kind of product. We have been delighted by the response from the market already and can see that this new fashion is likely to be an important application for us in the future.”
Inline mixing is the preferred technology for food and beverage plants that require the high volume mixing of low viscosity products.
Source: GEA Process Engineering
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