Svinnoptimering VTIS1

Sammanfattning: The goals of this Bachelors’ Thesis were to establish the production loss through the VTIS1 Pasteur at Arla Foods Linköping dairy and then suggest simple but effective solutions to minimize the losses for each production run. If the timeframe allowed it, some of the solutions would be implemented and tested in full production to determine their impact on economic and environmental savings. The very first step of this project was to establish the statistics over what losses there is in the production pipeline through VTIS1, from milk and powders in mixer tanks to finished and packed products in cold storage. Then, when knowing how much product was actually lost and where, those bottlenecks could be pinpointed and examined more closely. At this stage the focus was switched, from the otherwise complicated and broad manufacturing process, to the VTIS1-aggregate, since early data indicated there were quite substantial losses there. In conjunction with this project Arla Foods purchased an absorption photometer-measuring device (OPTEK AS16) that could be inserted straight into the product stream out of VTIS1, allowing real time measurements of its optical density. A substantial series of measurements of the product stream (through all of November) indicated that a certain amount of pure quality product was discarded into the factory sewers with each production batch. Volumes of the product losses clearly depended on which sterile tank it was sent to, due to the different lengths of the pipelines. Through the production year of 2007 the VTIS1 aggregate pasteurised over 1500 batches of various products and all preliminary data indicates this number to increase significantly in 2008. Since most products going through VTIS1 contain both milk/cream and some flavourings or jams in various compositions, this means they are a fair bit more expensive per litre in comparison to plain milk. Since the VTIS1 aggregate is positioned fairly early in the production line it was deemed logical to start there to eliminate losses and then, if time would allow, move further down the stream. The time assigned for the project did allow for both creating a statistics database over product losses and the implementations of a few suggested adjustments. The report includes the estimated financial savings of this project for 2008; the numbers are based on how much the adjustments would have saved Arla Foods in economic losses through 2007. This includes the costs for the pure volumes of products as well as the estimated savings of environmental costs for waste treatment during that same period, based on the products’ COD, S-tot, N-tot and Ts contents.