Valio improves whey powder production

One of the largest whey powder production plants in Finland recently increased its output by more than 10% without having to invest in any hardware or use more energy in the process. This was made possible by implementing Neste Jacobs’ NAPCON? Suite’s applications for advanced process control (APC) to optimise the critical and energy intensive last stage of the production process.

Whey is a secondary product from cheese production. As it has a high nutritional value, the use of whey powder as a nutritional supplement or as an ingredient in foodstuffs is growing worldwide. However, its production is complex and energy-intensive, and requires precise control of moisture content.

“Too high water content causes stickiness of the whey powder that can disrupt or even stop the production”, said Antero Ylitalo, production manager at Valio’s whey powder factory. “On the other hand, if the powder is too dry it generates dust and uses excess energy.” The moisture content of the product is set within a spray dryer in the final stage of the production line.

“The critical thing is to be able to control the spray dryer’s load and the hot air streams in an optimal way“, Mr Ylitalo said. “We needed to keep the moisture content of the final whey powder product very close to its target value regardless of the process conditions, whilst taking into account  the dynamically changing multiple process constraints.” 

Process with many cross-dependencies
An APC solution was implemented at the production plant consisting of two tools included in Neste Jacobs NAPCON Suite: NAPCON ? Indicator, which calculates the material and energy balance information and sends it to NAPCON Controller, the multivariable model predictive control software package which is optimised for control of processes with cross-dependencies.

The result was that the APC solution automatically controlled the process so that the factory significantly increased its production. At the same time the risk for system downtimes due to bag filter clogging was reduced.

“We considered several APC providers but became convinced of Neste Jacobs’ expertise and the features of the NAPCON? Suite Technology", Mr Ylitalo said. “We are currently planning to implement APC technology also in other production plants and hope that we will be able to continue the good cooperation with Neste Jacobs in this area.”

No system downtimes
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