GEA has recently been awarded an exclusive patent for its GEA Clean Purge system for food and dairy spray dryers. The patent covers the process of purging feed nozzles while swapping feed systems to ensure continuous feed product to the spray dryer. In practice, this patent grants GEA exclusivity to supply dairy and food spray dryers that can operate continuously at the highest level of safety and efficiency with feed line swaps.
GEA Clean Purge is a significant safety and efficiency enhancement given it addresses the primary cause of fire and explosions in spray dryers while offering significant and valuable product and operational savings to GEA customers. The system has already delivered significant benefits to GEA customers around the world operating high performing powder plants.
Food and dairy dryers can operate continuously by using multiple feed systems – typically two or more feed lines upstream of the spray dryer. This is because the feed lines require regular daily cleaning using a three/four-hour clean-in-place process to prevent undesired bacterial growth and the risk of producing off-spec product. This requires a spray dryer designed for continuous operation to ensure a smooth and safe swap of the concentrate feed lines without interrupting the process. In turn, this requires a cleaning system that can efficiently purge and atomise the product remaining in the feed lines into the spray dryer to prevent loss of valuable concentrated feed product. The swapping and purging of feedlines is typically fully automated.
GEA Clean Purge is available on all new dairy spray dryers designed for continuous 24/7 production –or for other applications using nozzle lance change ‘on the fly.’ It can also be easily retrofitted to existing installations.
Plants using GEA Clean Purge, will benefit from significantly improved safety, higher yield, reduced water and chemical usage, reduced plant downtime and higher overall equipment efficiency (OEE). Plant operators will, depending on the application, plant size, and duty, be able to recover the initial investment quickly. The reduced risk of fire and explosion, however, will be realised immediately. For more visit gea.com
