• Client: Dairy Ice Cream Client, New South Wales, Australia
• Project: Dairy Ice Cream Pilot Plant
• Date: Mid to late 2012
• Duration: 16 weeks
• Size of project: 1,600m of pipe
The new pilot plant consisted of four main rooms. The first room is the mini mix room, where small amounts of product could be mixed until the right flavour was achieved. This room consisted of six small tanks all piped to the CIP system and to a small homogeniser. Each tank was made with a jacket, and each jacket was piped to the glycol system in order to keep the product inside the tank at the required temperature. The tanks were made with removable lids and removable agitators.
The second room was the main mix room. In this room we put in a stainless-steel tank, stainless-steel platform, heat exchanger, homogeniser, pumps and a stainless-steel holding tube. Once again the stainless-steel tank was piped up to the CIP system which allowed for a fully automated cleaning system. Orbital welding was used to maintain the high quality required but also an advantage of orbital welding is the speed, which helped to keep to the tight deadline.
The third room was the main filling and packing room. In this room we installed four freezers, four stainless-steel holding tanks and four pumps. Each freezer had a double contained outlet pipe with a long radius bend. The stainless-steel tube for the long radius bend had to be custom rolled, assembled and then welded. All spacers for the long radius bends were cut on the CNC waterjet cutter, to ensure a high degree of accuracy. The pumps and stainless-steel tanks were piped to the CIP system and also to the glycol system.
The fourth room was the CIP (clean in place) room. This consisted of three stainless-steel tanks, a pump and a tubular heat exchanger. The heat exchanger was piped up the steam and condensate lines. By using the CIP system it ensured that all pipework, pumps, valves, probes and tanks could be hygienically cleaned at any time with the push of a button.
Service and conduit pipework was routed through the allocated roof space above all four rooms.
All pipework was pressure tested, passivated and insulated with stainless-steel cladding. We met all client requirements of the project brief and completed the project within the designated timeframe with zero issues.
