The producers of dairy products must control the final quality of products by evaluating their textures. Certain devices on production lines such as heat exchangers cause texture losses, affecting product consistency. The mechanical stress due to plate heat exchangers is often at the origin of this change, although evaluations of products as they flow through heat exchangers are lacking. This work proposes a coupled approach to determine texture loss for yoghurt in a heat exchanger using rheological measurements and a Computational Fluid Dynamics approach. The results are based on the quantification of mechanical stress and compared with experimental measurements performed to evaluate texture loss in yoghurt samples.
Practical applications
The objective of this work is to optimize the production lines for dairy products such as yoghurts. To date, texture losses appear during their manufacture, resulting in a decrease in viscosity compared with the desired quality on the final product. By describing the behavior of yoghurt in a plate heat exchanger, the Computational Fluid Dynamics can diagnose mechanical stress and provide information that producers cannot access to improve their process. The work was carried out on a laboratory plate heat exchanger, which was used to select the yoghurt cultures used to produce the finished product. Simulations bring mechanical stress information to producers. They can thus correlate it to the loss of texture. The aim is to be able to reproduce this mechanical stress with devices other than the plate heat exchanger, but by first evaluating by modeling the mechanical stress to be applied.