Liquid fingerprint tech to help stop milk losses in dairies

For a typical dairy plant with an intake of around 250 million litres of milk per year, a loss of just 1% of the raw material corresponds to literally throwing about $1.5m down the drain.

With rising inflation and environmental focus, product loss management is more important than ever in dairy plants and other fluid processing plants.

In order to minimise wasting valuable milk products, it is essential to know where in the process the leak happens. If flow rate timings or other sensors and process parameters are not set correctly, valuable liquid product could be washed out with the wastewater.

Finnish company ColloidTek (Collo) has now developed a liquid fingerprint technology that can help address this problem by detecting any type of liquid in the pipes in real time. The technology supervises all draining points in real time, monitoring all liquids in the pipes to show exactly where leakages originated.

Mikko Tielinen, Head of Sales at ColloidTek, said as several types of traditional sensors are needed to detect different types of liquids, such as whey, cream and cleaning chemicals, the optimisation systems become complicated and expensive to manage.

“Our solution, on the other hand, offers an easy and very accurate way to detect where exactly in the process the leakage is,” Tielinen said.

“It measures the exact real-time liquid fingerprint at any desired point in the process with a single EMF-sensor. Combined with machine learning, our solution ensures that the process stays optimised and easily monitored through our cloud solution.”

Usually, product losses in the process are noticed when there is an excess of organic material in the effluent. This can also be a sign of problems in the production; however, measuring just the effluent does not tell why, and from where too much milk product is getting flushed out with the wastewater.

“As our technology can supervise all the draining points in real time, it can keep track of the liquids in the pipes and show exactly where the leakage is,” Tielinen said. “This makes it possible to address the problem at the point of origin, saving huge amounts of milk and money.”

In addition to directly improving the profitability of a dairy plant, reducing the milk waste also lowers the cost of wastewater treatment and helps dairies to achieve their environmental goals.

“Most of the carbon dioxide generated in a dairy production originates from the stages before the milk even arrives at the dairy,” Tielinen said. “That is why it is essential to not waste valuable milk in the dairy’s processing operations. If milk-based products are lost in a dairy, a replacement amount of milk will have to be produced and transported to the dairy, which will produce even more carbon dioxide emissions.”