7 minute read
Robotic drone solution for disinfecting food plants wins prize
CLEANING & HYGIENIC DESIGN
©stock.adobe.com/au/littlewolf1989
Robotic drone solution
for disinfecting food plants wins prize
The grand-prize winner of this year’s Rabobank-MIT Food and Agribusiness Innovation Prize — Human Dynamics — is seeking to improve sanitation in food production plants with a robotic drone or ‘drobot’.
Designed to fly through facilities spraying soap and disinfectant, the company said the robotic drone can help with daily sanitation tasks at food production facilities.
Co-founder Tom Okamoto, a master’s student in MIT’s System Design and Management (SDM) program, said the average large food manufacturer spends $13 million on sanitation annually. When this is combined with the time sanitation processes take away from production and delays due to human error, his company estimates this solution is tackling an $80 billion problem.
The company’s prototype uses a quadcopter drone that carries a tank, nozzle and spray hose. Underneath the hood, the drone uses visual detection technology to validate that each area is clean, LIDAR to map out its path and algorithms for route optimisation.
The product is designed to automate repetitive tasks while complementing other cleaning efforts currently done by humans. Workers will still be required for certain aspects of cleaning and tasks like preparing and inspecting facilities during sanitation.
The company has already developed several proofs of concept and is planning to run a pilot project with a local food producer and distributor this year.
The Human Dynamics team also includes MIT researcher Takahiro Nozaki, MIT master’s student Julia Chen and Harvard Business School students Mike Mancinelli and Kaz Yoshimaru.
The second-place prize went to Resourceful, which aims to help connect buyers and sellers of food waste by-products through an online platform. The company said there is a growing market for upcycled products made by companies selling things like edible chips made from juice pulp, building materials made from potato skins and eyeglasses made from orange peels. But establishing a by-product supply chain can be difficult.
“Being paid for by-products should be low-hanging fruit for food manufacturers, but the system is broken,” said co-founder and CEO Kyra Atekwana, an MBA candidate at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. “There are tens of millions of pounds of food waste produced in the US every year, and there’s a variety of tech solutions … enabling this food waste and surplus to be captured by consumers. But there’s virtually nothing in the middle to unlock access to the 10.6 million tons of by-product waste produced every year.”
Buyers and sellers can offer and browse food waste by-products on the company’s subscription-based platform. The businesses can also connect and establish contracts through the platform. Resourceful charges a small fee for each transaction.
The company is currently launching pilots in the Chicago region before making a public launch later this year. It has also partnered with the Upcycled Food Association, a non-profit focused on reducing food waste.
Other finalists included: • Chicken Haus, a vertically integrated, fast-casual restaurant concept dedicated to serving locally sourced, bone-in fried chicken; • Joise Food Technologies, which is 3-D printing the nextgeneration of meat alternatives and other foods using 3-D biofabrication technology and sustainable food ink formulation; • Marble, which is developing a small-footprint robot to remove fat from the surface of meat cuts to achieve optimal yield; • Nice Rice, which is developing a rice alternative made from pea starch that can be upcycled; and • Roofscapes, which deploys accessible wooden platforms to ‘vegetalise’ roofs in dense urban areas to combat food insecurity and climate change.
This was the sixth year of the event, which was hosted by the MIT Food and Agriculture Club. The event was sponsored by Rabobank and MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel World Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS).
Cold Storage Range
OR BUST & EFFECTIV E TO-30°C
The A-SAFE Cold Storage range has been meticulously engineered to provide the highest levels of protection to pedestrians, assets and infrastructure. From the robust rack protection of RackGuard, to PAS 13 compliant fork protection, bollards, barriers and height restrictors, the Cold Storage range offers a full suite of high-performance safety products for applications within very low-temperature environments. Food-safe, robust and effective to -30°C, Cold Storage products from A-SAFE have been purposedesigned for use in frozen food storage facilities and other challenging sub-zero environments. Benefit from the ultimate in low-temperature performance and reduced maintenance costs without compromising on hygiene.
CLEANING & HYGIENIC DESIGN
Cleaning-in-place (CIP) systems
Maintaining hygienic, and in some cases sterile, production equipment is a key aspect of modern food processing, as well as the production of pharmaceuticals and other products. Cleaning-in-place (CIP) is the standard technique to effectively and efficiently clean equipment which contains pipework, enclosed spaces and small apertures in situ.
HRS Heat Exchangers has cleaning-in-place (CIP) and sterilisation-in-place (SIP) systems for cleaning and disinfection for all hygienic industries, including food and pharmacy industry systems. Its single- and multi-tank HRS CIP/SIP Systems are supplied complete with a control system to enable automated cleaning cycles.
The systems are fully skid mounted and have modular designs for quick and easy site installation. The single-tank (ST) system is designed for simple cleaning applications where recovery of the cleaning fluid is not required, while multi-tank (MT) systems are suitable for more complex situations.
For small, portable applications the tank can be heated to 85°C using electric heating elements, but steam heating using an HRS K Series multitube heat exchanger is also available. Units start at 500 L capacity and single-tank systems are available up to 2500 L. Larger systems can be provided using multiple tanks and centrifugal sanitary pumps are fitted as standard.
Systems are fully automated using programmable logic controller (PLC) systems and human-machine interfaces (HMI), which can be standalone or integrated into the factory’s main control system.
HRS Heat Exchangers Australia New Zealand
www.hrs-heatexchangers.com/au/
Easily insert fillings inside food casings
With Rheon machinery you can create your designer fillings – sauces, vegetables, condiments, pizza, cheese and insert them into meat, chicken, seafood, bread products, cookies, arancini and lots more.
MODELS TO SUIT ALL MANUFACTURERS, BOTH LARGE & SMALL
Phone: (61 2) 9939 4900 Email: ssyme@symetec.com C22/148 Old Pittwater Road, Brookvale NSW, Australia www.symetec.com
CLEANING & HYGIENIC DESIGN
When a pharmaceutical manufacturer needed mirror polished tank mixing eductors for three new tanks, they called Tecpro Australia to provide a solution for their exact requirements.
The challenge
A pharmaceutical manufacturer was commissioning three new 57,000 L tanks that measured 6 m high x 3.5 m diameter.
Each tank required two mixing eductors with an integrated insertion lance. To meet the exacting hygiene standards of the manufacturing process, the eductor and lance required mirror polishing internally and externally. The minimum required surface finish specifications were 0.8 microns RA.
Specialised hygienic clamp fittings were also required to prevent any bacterial build-up.
The solution
Tecpro had to get creative in order to achieve the required mirror polish finish.
Small sections of the insertion lance were cut, mirror polished internally and externally, then welded back together.
Before the tank could be commissioned, the materials, surface polish and weld points were all inspected and certified as achieving the required ultra-hygienic standards. All three tanks are now operating.
Tecpro Australia is a specialist engineering supplier that works across a broad range of industries. It provides off-theshelf solutions as well as design, fabrication and consulting expertise for customers requiring unique solutions such as the ultra-hygienic, mirror polished eductors and insertion lances for this project. Tecpro Australia www.tecpro.com.au