Sterilization Plant simulation of whole milk UHT Type through the Aspen plus

Resumo

The milk sterilization process aims to diminish or extinguish the microbial load present in the food in order to reduce possible damage arising of the metabolic processes of microorganisms that might be present in food. The system currently used in milk processing plants have direct injection principle oversaturated steam in a certain volume of milk in order to establish microbiological reduction, then the product is directed to a tank where flash evaporation condensed the steam is taken off after the product part to the homogenizer where fat molecules are broken making the standardized product. In this whole process is used a system called VTIS (Vacum Therm Instant Steriliser) developed by Tetra Pak company that consists of a piece of equipment back to the sterilization of liquid foods. The computational model used the Aspen plus programmable plataform that by means of unit operations allows you to predict the behavior of a process, this plataform lets you interactively vary some elements of the process in order to obtain desired results through the flowsheets of feed compositions and operating conditions. The ASPEN plus enables the realization of sensitivity analysis, generation of graphs and tables, estimation, regression of physic-chemical properties, settings of simulation models the operative data, equipment sizing, cost analysis, and data input sheets of calculations. As a result was able to reproduce a process without the need for costs.