Process Control – buchinir

BUCHI and CEMSI: Partners in Integration

A rapidly rising consumer food company needed NIR technology to quickly test final product quality in their pilot plant R&D facility. The R&D team wanted an NIR to provide non-contact, process control measurements of food products passing rapidly by on a conveyor belt. However, being a pilot facility, they desired adjustable and temporary mounting approaches to optimize measurements and accommodate relocations within the plant.

The BUCHI NIR-Online X-Beam, designed to be used with conveyor systems, was a clear fit for the job, and the BUCHI NIR specialists were able to precisely and automatically trigger measurements as products were passing under the sensor. However, installing the sensor at the conveyor while allowing for future relocation or adjustments was an immediate challenge.

Enter Brad Young, a Technical Sales Specialist for CEM Specialties, Inc. (CEMSI), who called a local engineering part shop and manufactured a mobile platform on the spot to start a month-long trial period ending with incredible results. The customer is now looking to implement BUCHI NIR-Online technology at production facilities worldwide. Additional projects in development for this customer include sampling incoming materials and in-process measurements at the extruders.

Brad Young, a Technical Sales Specialist for CEMSI, executes his engineering expertise at a customer site, building a customized solution for a feasibility study at a pilot plant. The platform he devised supported an NIR-Onlinen X-Beam sensor over a conveyor belt transporting finished food products.

While BUCHI has a team of service engineers and product specialists available to facilitate NIR method development, installation and implementation, certain scenarios arise where additional and rapid engineering expertise is needed. For that reason, BUCHI Corporation has formally teamed up with CEMSI to offer superior support to customers who need a customized engineering solution to successfully implement NIR-Online sensors into their process.

In this blog, we will explore: who CEMSI is, how this partnership works, and the benefits of the enhanced engineering capacity offers in combination with the robust NIR-Online Solutions portfolio offered by BUCHI. To find out more, we interviewed Steve Di Muzio, Technical Sales Supervisor, and Gary Saunders, Vice President, Operations of CEMSI.

Who is CEMSI?

For over 25 years, CEMSI has been providing process and emission monitoring solutions throughout North America and internationally to various industries including cement, mining, power, as well as chemical and petrochemical. Our support services include system design, integration, service (including preventive maintenance and troubleshooting).

What kind of projects does CEMSI work on?

We have global experience ranging from large-scale projects like gasoline blending analysis in the petrochemical industry and full-scale process and emission monitoring solutions in the cement industry to small CO-O2 boiler applications for emission monitoring. We can design very simple cost-effective solutions to more complex custom systems for the most demanding applications.

As an example, in the chemical and petrochemical industry, analysis of incoming raw material and final product have traditionally been done using gas chromatographs. This technology is becoming dated, often requiring complex sample systems and shelters to house this equipment, not to mention the lengthy delay for analysis.

How much do the innovations of BUCHI NIR being introduced by CEMSI to some of these older methodologies typically save the customer?

In addition to the cost of the Gas Chromatograph (GC), you would require the sample system, shelter, integration of equipment into the shelter, crane to install shelter into place to name a few. There are additional on-going costs like heating and cooling the shelter housing the GC system. The BUCHI spectrometer mounts directly on the process, circumventing these costly additions. Based on hardware cost alone, we could easily estimate an $800,000 savings per installation.

Moreover, the process GC cost of ownership can approach 1,500 man hours and about $50,000 in preventative maintenance and emergency repair parts per year per unit. In comparison, the BUCH NIR consumes about 16 hours and $2,000 in preventative maintenance parts per year per unit.

What other markets do you think could benefit from these new NIR approaches?

Chemical manufacturing
Petrochemical refining
Cement
Food & beverage
Natural gas
Biofuels

How does the BUCHI-CEMSI partnership benefit the customer?

CEMSI is always looking for innovative ways to help improve our customers’ processes. We strive to help them save money through process optimization, reduction of maintenance time and cost. Our team has had opportunities to help our customers realize savings by reducing their product giveaway through improved analysis.

The BUCHI NIR-Online system gives CEMSI the opportunity to achieve our goal of helping our customer save money, increase sampling frequency and measurement accuracy. Many industries continue to use old measurement techniques that often take several minutes rather than seconds to get a data point. With the BUCHI NIR-Online technology, the customer will have the ability to get a lot more data points in the same amount of time that they were getting a single data point. This can be very useful to see trends and make necessary process adjustments on the fly. With this, the customer can minimize product giveaway, and ensure their final product meets the specification tolerances.

The NIR-Online X-Beam is one of several NIR-Online product configurations available. Each unit is ingress protected (IP65, IP66k) with optional Class 1 Div 1, ATEX, and CSA certification (gas and dust). Shown here in an “up-view” configuration, this versatile sensor can be adapted to accommodate many installation scenarios or requirements, including the addition of VIS and camera options to expand analytical capabilities.

Leveraging CEMSI experiences with integration, installation, troubleshooting and repair in tough applications with the BUCHI NIR-Online analyzer provides a simplified installation for the customer, directly in the field or on the production line.

BUCHI Application Specialist, Mark Sullivan, works alongside CEMSI Technical Sales Specialist to optimize data collection frequency and measurements of finished food product parameters including fat, protein and moisture.

BUCHI has a solid product and most installation will be straight-forward. However, there are some applications that will require out-of-the-box thinking to allow the NIR analyzer to maintain its intended purpose of being an easy to install, easy to use, easy to maintain, real-time data generating analyzer.

Partnering with BUCHI allows us to use our wealth of industry knowledge, combined with a high-quality product, to provide turnkey solutions to our customers. It is exciting to be able to offer customers a system that offers real-time analysis of their incoming raw material and their final product and be able to adjust processes to improve their product quality.

Fall is Doughnut Season (add an NIR for the perfect Baker’s Dozen)

In the northeast, fall ushers in crisp, cool air, vibrantly colored leaves… and doughnut season.

Whether you’re getting your round, deep-fried cake from roadside from the Pennsylvania Amish or from a commercial bakery, quality is key. Krispy Kreme has been serving up delicious doughnuts for generations in the USA and even across the globe, so you may have heard of them. Their mission statement says in no uncertain terms: To make the most awesome doughnuts on the planet every single day.

Most doughnut aficionados believe that Krispy Kreme does make the most awesome doughnuts on the plant. So, the question becomes: how do they execute that mission statement with such incredible consistency? The BUCHI Studios team took a little road trip to their plant in Winston Salem, NC to find out.

The Winston Salem plant prepares the powder blends that will ultimately be used to create “sweet fluffy clouds of deliciousness” in Krispy Kreme bakeries throughout the USA, as well as the concentrates, or key powder ingredients, used in bakeries around the globe. The Quality team is focused on providing consistency in their mixes to ensure that sweet taste experience from Nibley, Utah to England or even Thailand. Near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy has become an important measurement tool to that end.

“Anything coming in… we want to be able to test it as quickly as we can as soon as we can, so that we know all the way through the process it’s already been tested, it’s been approved, it’s okay and we can continue.
Rob Paxton, Krispy Kreme Donuts

The use of NIR to provide quantitative or qualitative measurements on flours or even proprietary mixes is not new, and its prevalence in the industry is a consequence of the technique’s very fast measurement times (from fractions of a seconds to seconds) that simultaneously deliver critical sample properties like moisture, protein, fat and ash, to name a few.

NIR is used at Krispy Kreme to ensure that incoming ingredients meet specifications before entering the process, to monitor critical parameters (like moisture, protein and fat) during blending, and to ensure that the concentrates meet stringent quantitative criteria before being shipped to bakeries worldwide.

Krispy Kreme plant worker empties bag of flour to be used to for proprietary powder mix.

BUCHI offers three NIR products to meet the needs of flour millers and bakeries. Of those, Krispy Kreme has implemented the NIRMaster and NIR-Online. The NIRMaster is a rugged, at-line NIR product with hygienic design well-suited for the food industry. This Fourier-transform (FT) NIR product is designed to provide the ultimate in spectroscopic performance, enabling exceptionally accurate and consistent sample measurements. The NIR-Online is an NIR product of extreme ruggedness that can be directly attached to process equipment like hoppers or blenders, or suspended over conveyors, and provide real-time process monitoring feedback. The difference between the dispersive NIR technology of the online sensor and FT-NIR was drawn out in a prior blog, however, both technologies have an important role to play in food processing and testing.

BUCHI NIRMaster (left) provides at-line measurements in the QC lab or on the production room floor, while the NIR-Online sensor (right) is installed directly to the blender for in-process measurements.

krispy kreme testimonial

Dollars to donuts, NIR can provide reliable measurements that can support quality control and production… but don’t take our word for it! Watch the Krispy Kreme customer testimonial.

More on: the use of NIR in milling and bakery

Quality control of raw materials and ingredients

At uploading bulk flour or at bakery sites, NIR can be used to prevent unsatisfactory loads of raw materials, check that shipments conform to specifications, determine the quality of whole and ground grains, and quantify important factors of raw materials for better quality of finished products.

Quality control of bakery mixtures and dough

At a production site, NIR can be used to predict flour yield, water absorption and dough development time, quantify baking mixture ingredients or composition (e.g. %-moisture, %-protein), determine ash content affecting baking performance, and determine starch damage and water absorption during the milling process.

Quality control of finished products

At a production site or packing area, NIR can be used to control the quality of finished products (e.g. bread, biscuits, flour, confectionery, pasta and breakfast cereal), ensure compliance with any statutory composition requirements (e.g. moisture content of bread), or provide data for nutritional labeling.

Learn more: webinar

To learn even more about how NIR is used in flour milling (the backbone ingredient for bakery applications), you can check out the streaming webinar below.

Do-nut Fear: NIR Quick-Start is Here

For those flour or bakery producers who are interested in following in the sweet footsteps of the Krispy Kreme NIR program, BUCHI offers a broad portfolio of quick-start pre-calibrations to start collecting measurements of common ingredients right away. For the more customized blends, we have NIRWare software and Auto-cal to support the NIRMaster and NIR-Online method development, respectively. We have Application Specialists to support training for in-house calibration development using NIRWare. For online applications, AutoCal is a simple push or click button allowing to directly time stamp a sample. The sample is manually collected up- or downstream (with the optional by-pass sampler a time stamped sample is even automatically collected!) at a sampling point and subjected to internal or external reference analytics. Afterwards resulting values (e.g. protein, moisture and fat mass percentage) are directly entered into the software and the calibration is automatically updated.

Auto-cal is also integrated into the operating software of the BUCHI at-line NIR product ProxiMate which is a great fit for the food industry due to the ease of use, ruggedness and hygienic design.

Measuring a flour sample on the new BUCHI ProxiMate at-line NIR system.

Visit our NIR Applications Finder to configure your solution based on the ingredients or products that are important to you, download the NIR Milling and Bakery Applications brochure, or contact us to discuss your applications.

Things are really getting cheesy at BUCHI.

When prodded, I suppose many at BUCHI would agree that some of the cheesiest members of the team belong to the NIR group.

Maybe that’s something to be proud of!

Cheese is delicious, after all. With a global market of around $100 Billion USD, I think there is a general agreement on the matter.

There are many ways to consume cheese, of course. Processed cheese products like fondue have their place on the cheese continuum, particular around special events like graduation parties and weddings that seem to dominate our summer calendars.

Manufacturing processed cheese products like fondue is a complex task, with special emphasis on key quality parameters like total solids and fat content.

These products are typically produced by blending one or more shredded natural cheeses with additional ingredients, such as: emulsifying salts, condiments, flavors and other goodies. This mixture is then heated and sheared until a homogeneous molten mass is obtained which can be poured into heart- or graduation-capped shaped molds or other shapes for future devouring.

In order to consistently deliver the same great-tasting product, real-time control of key quality attributes is a must. Monitoring total solids content, fat, salt, pH, homogeneity and more during a blend can allow for real-time process adjustments to meet all of the quality targets and avoid having to rework a batch. The end result: tasty cheese products (read: make money) and improved manufacturing efficiency (read: save money).

While traditional laboratory methods exist for determining the quality parameters, issues with representative sampling and the method collection times are rate-limiting.

Want to learn more? Contact Us and request Short Note #357, or ask to speak with an Applications Specialist to learn more about how you can implement NIR for better process control in cheese manufacturing.

You can also visit our NIR-Online Solutions page to learn more.

If cheese quality is on your mind, but an on-line solution isn’t a good fit, BUCHI also has milk & dairy solutions for our off-line and at-line NIR. You can use our NIR Applications Finder on-line tool to configure the perfect NIR solution for you. Choose your industry and products, then get a full listing of available pre-calibrated applications, plus a quote.

Among our pre-calibrated parameters, you’ll find: dry matter, moisture, fat, protein, lactose, fatty acids, total sugar, ash and more.

Use our new NIR Application Finder to get the latest in Pre-Calibrated Solutions for your industry.

Interested in an application that isn’t listed? Fear not! We have a team of Application Scientists at the ready. Reach them using our Application Support Request Form .

If you’re looking for the full gamut of our published cheese & dairy applications, check out the BUCHI Application Finder. You’ll find methods related to:

Extraction
Spray Drying
Kjeldahl for protein determination
Near-infrared spectroscopy

Stay cheesy, my friends!

Quality is Going to the Dogs.

Don’t worry, it’s a good thing.

This week, BUCHI Product and Application Specialists mingled with pet food suppliers and manufacturers at the Petfood Forum 2019 in Kansas City, MO. Some key topics on deck for event speakers include nutrition, labeling, product development, safety and manufacturing.

BUCHI Laboratory Solutions can help keep the fur kids happy and healthy.

Did you know BUCHI has its paws in the formulation, quality control and labeling aspects of the pet food industry?

Formulation

Our spray dryer and freeze dryer equipment can be used to develop innovative, nutritious and shelf-stable products for happy, healthy pets. These technologies have been used to optimize stability and bioavailability for pet food ingredients, including: natural products, amino acids, proteins, vitamins and oils.

Quality Control

WATT Global Media conducted a survey and identified raw material ingredient quality as the top concern among surveyed Petfood Forum registrants. BUCHI provides expertise and laboratory and process equipment which helps to address quality standards at various stages along the pet food value chain, from raw material intake, to in-process quality control, to finished product testing to validate label claims.

The multi-axis plot shown below is a type of decision tree to determine which is the most appropriate method to select for protein determination, comparing Kjeldahl (red line), Dumas (yellow dashed line) and NIR (blue dashed line). For example, if your current need is for a high-speed analysis with a small environmental footprint, suitable for moderate sample type variation, then NIR is a good choice. If labeling compliance is of chief concern, with potential to adapt methods to broad variation in sample types, then Kjeldahl is a better selection.

Raw material inspection is an important component of a quality control program. Understanding the actual quality and parameters of incoming materials can help avoid process or nutritional deviations that occur because of out-of-spec ingredients. There is also an economical component: formulate closer to target and minimize issues like “protein give-away,” or avoid product recalls due to mislabeled or contaminated ingredients.

Near-infrared spectroscopy is one tool in the analytical toolbox that has been useful for establishing quality in raw ingredients, from grains to raw meats. The speed of analysis is well-suited for a quick quality check against Certificates of Analysis upon receipt of supplied goods.

Typical parameters measured by NIR in meat products include: protein, fat and moisture. For meat applications, color, pH, salt, starch and collagen content may also be implemented. These and other calibrations may be further refined with the addition of samples representative of the ingredient suppliers used within any production scheme.

Click to view a webinar highlighting ways to manage pet food production & quality using NIR

Properties of raw meat ingredients can be monitored at the time of their production, with installation points over a conveyor belt, directly in product pipes or processing equipment including deboners, grinders or mixers. An example of online measurements of protein, moisture and fat content of minced meat at a mixer has been described in a BUCHI short note . These same calibrations can be applied in-line or off-line for the pet food manufacturer who sources meat from a supplier. Large premium meat producers such as Mircana have successfully implemented this equipment to make real-time corrections to processing deviations at the mixer.

Watch this short clip to see how single or multipoint inline NIR sensors can help you control your production process

Labeling

Kjeldahl is the most established reference method for protein determination in feed, and commonly serves as a reference for NIR. You can find applications for protein and fat determination by Kjeldahl and Soxhlet extraction using our BUCHI Application Finder. Some of the content you’ll find includes:

quantifying fat in fish food and animal feed
nitrogen & protein determination in dry pet food , wet pet food or grains & soy

The BUCHI Booth at Petfood Forum is getting packed up later today. If you missed us, Contact Us to schedule a chat with an Application Specialist, or even a virtual demo!

Chemical Industry QC with NIR

Read this post, or watch the webinar instead!

Quality control for many labs involves a heavy dose of wet chemistry methods, things like titration and separation techniques that take skill, time and (even more) chemicals to execute. Luckily, some of these traditional testing methods can be replaced by simple, fast and safe NIR spectroscopy.

While this blog title indicates applicability to the Chemical Industry, “chemical” is one broad umbrella. There are myriad products and processes that fall under the chemicals category, from natural products like wood and pulp to personal care products to standard bulk chemicals. Reaching all of these audiences with one blog post seemed a little daunting until we broke it down to some common key themes for implementation of NIR for the chemical (or any!) industry:

Raw material qualification
Intermediate/in-process testing
Finished product testing

Of course, the typical applications that might fall into any one of these categories will differ based on the products being produced. Some of the more common applications include:

Material identification
%-Moisture or %-solvent quantification
Reaction extent or %-polymerization
Hydroxyl and acid number determination

As with many other industries, the raw materials used for production of chemical products are often non-discrete, sourced from various parts of the galaxy, and labeled–sometimes correctly, sometimes not. If you follow product recalls, you’ll find that millions of dollars have been lost due to mislabeled containers being poured into mixers, placed on trucks for distribution to other producers, or stocked on store shelves.

NIR is one quick tool used for identity testing of routinely received materials. There is potential to differentiate isomers, crystalline forms, chemical analogs, fatty acids, and even contaminated materials. Because identity testing with NIR takes seconds and can be done in the warehouse, more frequent testing can be accomplished without backlogging the QC guys and gals.

On the quantitative side, there is plenty to measure keeping in mind the inherent sensitivity of NIR to particular molecular bonds, including O-H, C-H, N-H and C-O bonds. So, if those bonds are changing in type or in number, NIR could be a great fit. This is the case in the typical chemical application of determining hydroxyl number, where we observe a decrease in NIR signal attributed to O-H bonds as those O-H end groups are consumed during polymerization. In fact, determining hydroxyl number of polyols by NIR is a standard practice per ASTM and ISO.

BUCHI Market Manager and former BUCHI NIR Applications Specialist Ryanne Palermo produced a short webinar on these topics, including a fiery example of tracking nitrogen substitution in nitrocellulose. Tune into the webinar by clicking here.

Find more free, streaming content on our BUCHI Webinar On-Demand page, including information about preparative chromatography, laboratory and industrial evaporation, drying, encapsulation and more.

Champion saves the day: Volume 2 Production

In-process and at-line NIR for production

Beat the costs in production! Download Volume 2 of the Champions’ Guidebook and find out how to save money while monitoring production lines.

Our determined (and love-struck) food champion, Max, is back at it. Check out the newest animated video to see how NIR can avoid costly production errors (and increase profitability) after googly-eyed Max’s big goof-up.

One of the greatest assets of on-line and at-line NIR is having a second set of (focused) “eyes” on production operations. The NIR can be trained to measure critical material properties for in-process or finished products, or even do simple identification procedures to confirm questions like: is Product A is actually being produced?

Max may be a little distracted at times, but NIR can still make him a champion!

Be a Food Analysis Champion!

Save time with efficient incoming goods inspection

New BUCHI campaign delivers 3 e-booklets to create Food Analysis Champions!

Every day, food producers undergo myriad processes and procedures designed to achieve a quality product and (hopefully) a profitable business.

The loading docks and warehouse serve as initial points of contact for ingredients and foodstuffs that will become integrated into delicious (and sometimes nutritious) food products. It is the obligation of the producer to ensure that they are obtaining the highest quality and correctly priced goods prior to feeding those ingredients into the production process.

Our first booklet provides insight into challenges and opportunities related to incoming goods inspection, including:

Typical slow-downs in incoming goods receiving
Tips to meeting incoming goods inspection requirements efficiently
Benefits of using fast, non-destructive NIR analysis for testing incoming goods
Improving time-to-result for classical reference methods (i.e. extraction and Kjeldahl)
Sample NIR and classical testing applications to help you save time!

Download this complimentary resource, and stay tuned for future additions to the series, including: production and finished goods control!

For some nice (and enlightening) lunch break entertainment, watch our Food Analysis Champion, Max, save the day when production is halted due to QC backlog in the BUCHI animated video short series for “Beat the Clock.”