Page 43 - Food&Drink magazine July 2021

HRS Heat Exchangers met a challenging brief to supply a customer in Australia with a compact yet efficient heat exchanger to process viscous dairy products.
Top performer in a tight space: Burra’s new heat exchanger.
A tight spot for dairy heat exchanger
BURRA Foods is one of Australia’s leading dairy ingredient processors.
It produces value-added dairy products for the global food manufacturing market.
An upgrade to its Korumburra processing plant in Victoria required a heat exchanger to warm frozen milk products, but existing building and infrastructure meant the available space was severely limited.
The line produces skimmed milk concentrate and cream from frozen concentrates, which are then thermalised and cooled to ambient processing temperatures. The required heat exchangers needed to raise the product’s temperature from -5°Cto18°Cpriortothefinal
heater, which includes melting the frozen product. After this the product is then cooled from 10°C to 5°C in the final cooler.
The consistency of the skimmed milk concentrate and cream is quite viscous, so the heat exchanger needed to resist fouling and provide good heat transfer performance. It also had to integrate with the plate heat exchangers used in the process in an extremely limited footprint.
The solution was an HRS MI Series corrugated tube heat exchanger which provided the necessary heating and cooling requirements in the tight space and a small pressure drop, which was another important consideration for the installation. Following an initial enquiryattheendof2019,the
unit was installed in mid-2020, and has exceeded performance expectations since final commissioning, with a production capacity of 5000 kg of product per hour.
Burra Foods process engineering manager Stuart Shattock says other suppliers couldn’t match HRS’s level of detail. “Once we placed the order, there was a slight delay due to Covid, but HRS managed to produce it as a rush order and the installation and commissioning was really smooth.
“In fact, they were able to accommodate a change to the process design partway through installation and make some improvements on the fly, which is great for a nimble and flexible foodandbeveragebusinesslike
ourselves,” Shattock says. “There are two parts to the unit:
the heater and the cooler. The heater has performed well and done exactly what we expected, while the cooler has actually done more than we expected.”
HRS Heat Exchangers’ Australian director Chris Little says its technology was needed to prevent fouling from the
thick cream component of the product, but the tight space added extra complexity. “The requirement for a heat exchanger with a small physical footprint meant that coming up with the final design was a challenge, but our engineering team rose to the occasion,” Little says.
The end result was a reliable solution that met Burra Foods’ needs,eveninatightspot. ✷
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