Make CIP an Integral Part of Your Process
Food Safety Experts
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You’ve automated your process and packaging and have computer-generated paper trails to show food safety and quality throughout your facility. Why wouldn’t you do the same with cleaning—wherever it’s practical? Granted, there are certain pieces of equipment you just have to take out of the process to clean manually, but for other components—like piping, some conveyor belting, certain pumps, mixers, tanks and other equipment—you can clean them in place (CIP) and have automated recordkeeping to show proof of cleaning and sanitation to regulating bodies when they ask.
CIP is an integral part of cleaning and sanitation, which affects the food safety of any facility. Cleaning and sanitation not only help you comply with regulatory requirements, but also protect consumers and your brand from contamination and recalls, says Pablo Coronel, Ph.D., CRB senior fellow - food process & food safety.
CIP is carried out in process lines without dismantling and must reach every nook and cranny of the process equipment; thus, well-designed equipment that is amenable to CIP (as opposed to COP—clean out of place) is a must for any installation. Materials of construction, drainability, ease of cleaning and prevention of dead areas/zones are some of the criteria for design, adds Coronel.
Besides the equipment design, a successful CIP system depends on several variables, such as water flow rate and temperature, chemicals used (concentration) and time of cleaning. These variables are set in cooperation with the chemical supplier by the characteristics of the product to be cleaned (viscosity, stickiness, amount of fouling and presence of allergens) and the equipment that needs to be cleaned. The presence of allergens, however, can complicate the CIP process.
CIP must be validated for each product (or family of products) to ensure that it is efficient, i.e., it brings the process equipment or line back to a clean state. Think of validation as a food safety preventive control, says Coronel.
Automation comes to the aid of an efficient CIP by ensuring that the right cycle is used with each product. During validation of CIP per product, a “recipe” is established for the cleaning and is applied by knowing which product was made. CIP systems can either automatically—or with human intervention—determine the optimal CIP recipe and monitor the use of chemicals and water as well as flow rate and temperature. Further advances in sensors can also help determine when the equipment is clean. CIP automation is one of the improvements for food safety and sustainability that any facility can implement, says Coronel. “Automation of CIP helps with consistency, record keeping and monitoring, which is an integral part of the food safety plan.”
Look at the Process to Understand CIP needs and Water Quality
“There are several things to consider when you start looking at the process,” says Neil Bogart, executive area technical support coordinator, Ecolab Food & Beverage. “The first thing to understand is the soils you are dealing with; which soil in the product matrix is the hardest to remove? Then there’s water quality. Since the CIP cleaning solution is made up of 95-99.5% water, we have to ensure the chemistry is not affected by impurities like hardness, alkalinity, chlorides, sulfates or metal ions.”
For example, water can contain varying levels of calcium and magnesium bicarbonates, which are temporary, and carbonates, which are permanent. The higher the content, the harder the water. The chemistry of calcium and magnesium makes them less soluble in water under normal cleaning and sanitizing processes, causing scaling that can bind the cleaning chemistry and not allow it to be active in the wash. As a result, more chemistry will be needed to overcome higher levels of hardness. Since the amount of calcium and other minerals in the water varies from place to place, the concentration of detergent and sanitizer choice can only be established once the water hardness and other contents and characteristics are known.
CIP: No Longer an Island of Automation
“The trend toward reducing ‘islands of automation’ is relevant for CIP systems for many reasons,” says Alan Maxwell, VP of process industries, E Tech Group, a CSIA Certified Member. “It can be practical to integrate what may traditionally have been a standalone manual or semi-automatic system into the broader process control system. The decision becomes even easier when you realize machine-level edge technologies and peer-to-peer Ethernet network connectivity allow for this to be done easily and cost-effectively.”
Maxwell notes other reasons for integration:
Having the Data You Need to be Competitive and Prove Compliance
“Without continuous measurement of CIP control parameters, staying competitive is nearly impossible in today’s food processing landscape,” says Ola Wesstrom, Endress+Hauser food & beverage industry marketing manager. Without good CIP data, contamination risks inevitably result in wasted product, water, energy, and detergents—or worse, recalls. In most cases, CIP parameters are captured in a historian via PLC communication pathways, or in standalone digital recorders, like the Endress+Hauser Memograph M RSG45, says Wesstrom.
“As we eye further efficiency gains, we are looking to analyze organic load of the detergent before and after the process is cleaned,” says Wesstrom. “Applying UV or NIR measurement sensors enables us to model organic load, resulting in time savings of around 10 to 30%.”
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Users of CIP are realizing that it is just as important to automate the data recording process (recording cleaning parameters like time, temperature, conductivity, flow, etc.) as it is to automate the cleaning—which is the CIP’s core job,” says Sani-Matic’s Barrie, who makes the case for efficiency gains. “While the CIP automates the cleaning, oftentimes a quality team or member is reviewing the cleaning data before releasing the equipment back into production. If a quality person can review the data digitally on their computer seconds after the CIP is done for multiple CIP systems rather than having to track down paper data across the facility, the time to get back to production can be shortened.”
“We use our HMI/SCADA systems to poll relevant sensors (typically temperature, conductivity and flowrate at the CIP return),” says Ericksen. “Modern SCADA systems can poll these sensors every second, or even faster, to develop an (almost) continuous graph based on time. We can also record the start and end dates/times of each CIP, which circuit was washed, which cycle was used and whether the cycle completed successfully or not. Combine this with a proper historian system of some sort, and we can develop whatever record is required for as far back as the data storage system allows.”
Software such as Sani-Matic’s SaniTrend cloud system allows for instant and complete data access securely with just accessing an online portal with this information. In many cases, these software packages provide additional features that increase efficiency—like overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) scoring, e-mail and text alerts and much more.
Novolyze software aggregates critical data from sensors on CIP machines and production lines (up to 200 entry-points), says Ndiaye. The line-release process can be managed within the Novolyze application with a simple workflow that triggers notifications to stakeholders. In case of deviation, line release reports can be enriched by corrective/preventive actions and comments by users to fully understand deviations and corrective actions. Data are then stored in an audit-friendly way that enables comprehensive and easy sharing capability plus process validation.
Despite all the good things that sensor data and automated recordkeeping bring, there is a surprising problem that can crop up—and who knows, maybe it’s the cause of some of the recent recalls reporting “product with potential cleaning compound contamination.”
FDA Recommendations on CIP for Raw and RTE Areas in the Plant
FDA recommends separate CIP systems for a facility that has both raw and cooked/RTE sections of the plant. Where this is not workable, FDA then recommends an alkaline cleaning solution at or above 71°C or 160°F. Certainly, new facilities can be designed with two separate CIP systems, but what about older facilities? What are the options?
Today, having separate raw and finished product CIPs is a best practice, says Tim Barthel, vice president of automation solutions at Cybertrol Engineering, a CSIA Certified member. “Buildings should be designed with physical separation to ensure crossing of raw and pasteurized product does not occur. We do have many situations we find with a single system, and due to potential allergens or other food safety concerns, it requires more refills/recharging of the chemical tanks.”
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