Wayne Labs has more than 30 years of editorial experience in industrial automation. He served as senior technical editor for I&CS/Control Solutions magazine for 18 years where he covered software, control system hardware and sensors/transmitters. Labs ran his own consulting business and contributed feature articles to Electronic Design, Control, Control Design, Industrial Networking and Food Engineering magazines. Before joining Food Engineering, he served as a senior technical editor for Omega Engineering Inc. Labs also worked in wireless systems and served as a field engineer for GE’s Mobile Communications Division and as a systems engineer for Bucks County Emergency Services. In addition to writing technical feature articles, Wayne covers FE’s Engineering R&D section.
For the last 20 years, 3-A SSI and EHEDG have been working together to create a synergistic set of hygienic design, testing and implementation standards for process equipment.
No one ever said 3-A Sanitary Standards Inc. (3-A SSI) and the European Hygienic Engineering and Design Group (EHEDG) guidelines were supposed to be compatible or directly interchangeable in an “apples to apples” sense. In fact, they were conceived at different times, in different parts of the world and with different needs in mind.
For the meat packing industry, lubrication for conveyors must maintain adequate lubricity in freezing cold areas, provide corrosion resistance and be safe to use.
You add up the mass of raw materials your facility consumes each day, look at the products it’s made, and the numbers just don’t balance—until you look at skids of rework and a dumpster topped off with the day’s malformed products and/or damaged packages.
Whether your plant is located in a drought-stricken area or where water is plentiful, building a wastewater treatment center on site may be cost effective for several reasons.
With the Sun Belt states experiencing serious droughts and the cost of processing wastewater escalating in many municipalities, conserving and reusing water at food and beverage processing facilities just makes plain business sense.
Many chemical bactericidal washes and rinses have been tried in the poultry processing industry with varying results; Campylobacter and Salmonella still find their way to finished product.
For some applications, non-thermal pasteurization or sterilization techniques can produce safe food as well as thermal techniques and preserve taste, texture and color.
Concerns rise due to the need to increase throughput as consumers clamor for more and more innovative food selections in a biosphere being pushed to its limits.
If run to failure is no longer an option, food and beverage processors have alternative ways to keep their equipment running at peak performance levels; they can plan maintenance schedules based on OEM suggestions.
You’ve seen the commercials for washday products that eliminate static cling. Ironically, the principle behind it gives an innovative robotic gripper a light, gentle touch that doesn’t bruise food items.
If you’ve ever experienced static cling when you take off a sweater in a dry, winter environment, you’re already familiar the technology behind Grabit’s robotic gripper technology, which the company calls electroadhesion.
No question about it, the numbers of reportable food and beverage projects in 2014 hit a nine-year high—a total of 635 compared to 555 in 2013, according to Food Engineering’s 38th Annual Plant Construction Survey.