Ezra Coughlin
Product Development Chemist, Ecolab
Ezra Coughlin is a product development chemist for the Food and Beverage division at Ecolab. Ezra leads innovation projects for dairy customers focused on improving aseptic, membrane and other dairy processing operations. Prior to Ecolab, Ezra studied Chemistry and Mathematics at St. Olaf College and holds a Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry from Purdue University.
Membrane CIP: Precision in Chemical Dispensing and Digital Data
Chemical dosing for membrane CIP (Clean-In-Place) is currently practiced in a variety of methods such as manual chemical addition to more automated methods, including time-based dispensing, weight-based dispensing, and flow-based dispensing. Each of these methods has a variety of pros and cons associated with them, ranging from safety, consistency, membrane life, wash consistency, CIP time, and cost. Ensuring safe, fast, accurate, and repeatable chemical dosing for membrane CIP is important due to the high value of production time, high cost of membrane replacement, and challenging troubleshooting scenarios which can occur. In addition to providing a review of the various method of chemical delivery employed in membrane CIP, this presentation will highlight the value of chemical dispensing data. Chemical dispensing data can be leveraged to assist in both understanding trends in chemical delivery and correlating to membrane performance, but also allow users to respond more rapidly to potential issues within a membrane system and facilitate more targeted troubleshooting techniques.