Linking fluid flow to cleaning performance via tailored food-grade soils

Cleaning is a critically important operation in the food, pharmaceutical and other sectors. Many cleaning in place (CIP) systems employed in manufacturing industry rely on the flow of cleaning solutions or solvents to achieve removal of the soiling layer. It would be highly desirable to be able to predict the cleanability of an item of process equipment or a production line at the design stage, so that plant and CIP processes can be designed for efficient cleaning. The potential impact is significant: cleaning consumes large quantities of fresh, potable water as well as thermal energy and chemicals, all of which influence the financial and ecological sustainability of food manufacturing operations. Advances in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods mean that the flow behaviour can be estimated with good levels of accuracy for many of the geometries and flow configurations which arise in practice. The link to cleanability lies in the rheology of the deposit and how it responds to the forces imposed by the fluid both instantaneously and over time. This project brings together expertise in CFD (Prof. Cant) with rheology (Prof. Wilson) to develop methods for predicting the cleaning performance of a range of food types.