IDM ¦ Technology/IT
New butter
production line
GEA Hilge NOVALOBE
Austrian dairy co-op Vorarlberg Milch processes 65m
kg of milk into fresh milk, cream, butter, yogurt, cottage
cheese, fruit drinks and award-winning cheese
specialties. The 120 employees have a common motto:
uncompromising hygiene standards and careful
use of resources.
René Längle, Production Manager for the “Weisse” & “Bunte”
range, views the high degree of flexibility as the company's specialty:
The dairy does not aim to be a high-volume production enterprise, it
instead focuses on the quality of the individual products. In this way,
it can quickly find organizational and technical solutions for special
customer requests. The company is even capable of supplying small
quantities on a day-to-day basis. For this purpose, the dairy is operating
with relatively many production lines. Since the previous butter
production plant required a lot of manual work, the cooperative has
decided to further improve the quality of “Ländle” butter by automating
its butter production line.
The solution
Since 2017, Vorarlberg Milch implements the most modern stage
of development for its butter production: GEA’s fully automated
(photo: GEA)
Vorarlberg Milch has state-of-the-art butter making equipment
(photo: GEA)
The GEA Hilge NOVALOBE rotary pump in the butter filling line
(photo: GEA)
BUE 1000 butter making machine. The manual work is now done
automatically according to prescribed recipes and is thus of a higher,
and above all, a reproducible product quality.
GEA’s hygienic pumps help to repeatably achieve the quality
goals in butter making: A GEA Hilge HYGIA pump pumps warm
water into a heat exchanger to temper the cream. A GEA Hilge
NOVALOBE transports the heated cream into a butter drum and
then into a kneading unit. A second NOVALOBE is installed in
the packaging line, which delivers butter from a butter silo for
packaging.
Why were these pumps chosen? Basically, because GEA Hilge
pumps operate smoothly, reports Christian Suppan. The maintenance
technician does not know of a single case where a GEA
pump unexpectedly failed and caused production to stop. Dairies
require special pumps that not only have the basic function of
transporting a medium, another key requirement is hygiene. These
pumps are not allowed to cause any contamination of the product.
For this reason, they need to be designed in a hygienic way without
dead spaces, gaps and with smooth surfaces.
GEA offers a hygienically safe and easy-to-handle solution with
its Hilge NOVALOBE rotary lobe pump. The rotary lobe pumps
8 · September/October 2020 ¦ international-dairy.com
/international-dairy.com
