MEASUREMENT
ARLA FOODS ANALYSES ENERGY CONSUMPTION USING FLOW SENSORS
Production location of Arla Foods in Falkenberg (Sweden).
Baumer FlexFlow® convinces with simple installation and efficient monitoring of the flow velocity and temperature of the medium.
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airy cooperative Arla Foods has, for the first time, created transparency over the energy consumed in cottage cheese production at its Falkenberg location. This involves the use of the Baumer Flex-Flow® sensor, which is able to measure the temperature of the medium as well as the flow rate. This cost reductions this could achieve in the future quickly made this a worthwhile investment.
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At its Falkenberg location, dairy cooperative Arla Foods produces 20,000 tonnes of cottage cheese every year equivalent to 76.9 tons per day. An impressive quantity indeed. Arla Foods satisfies almost the entire cottage cheese demand on the Swedish market and also exports to Finland, Denmark and Greece. Production volumes of this magnitude call for a resource-efficient manufacturing process, and Arla Foods is a forerunner when it comes to sustainability: the dairy cooperative intends to bemaking its products completely CO2-neutral by 2050. A key element of this journey: energy efficiency. Mattias Abrahamsson, Production System Manager at Arla Falkenberg, reports: “In recent years, we have placed an increasingly strong focus on monitoring the energy consumption of our plants. In certain areas, however, we simply didn’t know where exactly 25 | Industry EMEA | July 2020
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the energy was being used.” FlexFlow®, the calorimetric flow sensor from the Swiss sensor experts at Baumer achieved the breakthrough: Arla installed these sensors at the neuralgic points in the cooling and heating system and used the measurement results to obtain, for the first time, a clear image of the energy consumption. So the dairy producer can now derive concrete measures for reducing energy consumption. Clear solutions based on long-term collaboration Cooling and heating – these were the tricky points in the energy consumption for Arla Foods in Falkenberg. Because of its commitment to sustainability, the food manufacturer had already made a great effort to reduce the energy balance when the plant was designed. It uses to the greatest possible extent, for example, the low external temperatures of the Swedish climate to achieve a cooling temperature of 0.5 degrees Celsius for the cooling circuit, which cools the produced cheese from 60 to 30 degrees Celsius. Yet energy losses that Arla had been unable to localize for some time occurred here as well. “The potentials of the FlexFlow® sensor,” explained Mattias Abrahamsson, “caught our attention as soon as we heard about them. This sounded