Dairy

Introduction

Milk is the basis for every dairy product and one of the most controlled food products. The composition of raw milk changes by season, region and even from animal to animal. Controlling and improving product quality is essential to the milk and dairy producers in all phases of the production chain to assure consumer health. Therefore, standardization is necessary to maintain consistent milk quality.

Dairy Products like cheese, yoghurt, quark, butter, or cream – to name just a few – are versatile materials that require many different analyses depending on the material and its use. Analyzing compositional factors like moisture, total solids, lactose, protein or fat is required for nutritional information; further measurements concern the questions how the product performs.

Applications

NIR measures Milk in every state of aggregation

NIR is a well-established method for rapidly and simultaneously analyzing the incoming ingredients and their behaviour in the lab, at-line or in the production area. During start-up or after a cleaning cycle, the NIR results are used to reduce variation, improve formulations to develop new products and to increase the daily yield. Milk and all its products can be measured using the same setup, regardless of the composition of the product. ZEISS solutions are developed to measure precisely and to prepare the reference data for calibration purposes.

Solutions

Corona process is the complete solution

ZEISS Corona process sensor, combined with ZEISS ProcessAssist, is a complete and intelligent spectrometer system with precise calibration and intuitive software. It takes on a very broad range of measurement tasks such as at the processing the raw milk and final inspecting the dairy products.

The large spectral range, which covers the visible and the near infrared range, enables a wide range of applications. The optics, spectrometer, electronics and referencing are all located in the same housing together with the measurement head. Since light guides are not used for the optics, loss of light does not occur.

Due to its robust stainless steel housing, Corona process meets all hygiene requirements and can be easily integrated into technological processes. The automatic logging of the environmental conditions always ensures reliable measuring results regardless of the sample height or vibrations.

Benefits

Automatic internal referencing depending on environmental conditions
Accurate measurement even at a distance of 80 to 600 mm from the sample
Automatic compensation of sample distance influence even when sample heights vary dramatically
Unaffected by temperature fluctuations from -10 to +50 °C
Protected against shock and vibrations
Automatic warning when limit values are exceeded
Bulbs with a total service life of 20,000 hours
Long-term stability; does not require frequent external calibration and only needs little maintenance