John Koehl
Principal Chemist, Ecolab
John Koehl is a Principal Chemist in Ecolab’s Food & Beverage division, with focus on product development for the food, beverage, and dairy industries. He has worked on developing and implementing membrane CIP technologies for dairy producers for over 6 years. Some technologies John has worked on include membrane surfactants, enzymatic cleaners, and chemical dispensing equipment. John works closely with customers during implementation of new technologies to measure key performance indicators and ensure the products perform as intended.
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.