Energy-efficient evaporators

Evaporators are crucial for the production of milk powder. They are the working horses of FrieslandCampina. However, they consume a lot of energy. That's why FrieslandCampina is making the evaporators more efficient and energy-efficient. Process technologist Martijn Fox is closely involved in this.

Knowledge and expertise

Milk and other dairy products consist of about 90 percent water. To turn it into powder, we remove the water using evaporators and dryers. The evaporators remove the majority. They use far less energy than dryers, but for that last and most difficult bit, we need dryers. We have developed evaporators that allow us to extract moisture from dairy products more efficiently and energy-efficiently. This means the dryers have less work and we consume less energy.

The knowledge of our employees about evaporators and the evaporation process is crucial. Our colleagues have worked with evaporators for years and gained a lot of practical knowledge. We have documented this knowledge, mostly in the minds of our employees, and in combination with countless experiments and trials, we built a new evaporator in close collaboration with the manufacturer in 2013, called the I30. It is about 60 percent more energy-efficient than the existing evaporators.

Models

Because we were closely involved in the development of the I30, we gained a lot of knowledge and experience during the construction. All of this has resulted in a document that incorporates both the knowledge of the employees and our own experiences. Based on this knowledge document, we have created mathematical models that allow us to predict how the process unfolds in an evaporator.

We have been using evaporators at FrieslandCampina for years, but we actually had little insight into what exactly happens in an evaporator and how we could adjust and improve the process. Now, we can input the specifications of an evaporator into mathematical models and calculate how well it performs. This is very valuable because it allows us to find out why the evaporator is not running optimally and make targeted adjustments. New evaporators are currently being built in Borculo to replace five existing ones. These new evaporators will be analyzed with the new models. We expect that with these new evaporators, we will be able to achieve a large part of Borculo's sustainability goals.

Next steps

Currently, we are investigating with external parties if we can take further steps. Making the evaporators more energy-efficient and efficient significantly contributes to achieving our sustainability goals. However, evaporators are practically indestructible. They can easily last for forty years. In the meantime, technology has developed tremendously, so our evaporators are technically outdated before their expiration date. That's why they will gradually be replaced by modern, more energy-efficient evaporators in the coming years.