Study on the application of cleaning models with high speed water jets to CIP-processes

Original scientific paperTo meet consumer safety and high product quality there is a need of reliable cleaning processes in the food industry.To keep competitive position it is necessary to control costs of those cleaning in place (CIP) processes e.g.expenses for fresh and waste water, detergents and to minimize downtime of the production facilities.The removal of food soils with water droplet sprays are very little researched, especially the mathematical modelling.In this paper we show that the high pressure model of Leu et al. can be applied to low pressure spray cleaning of a food soil with marginal adaptations.We used an existing analytical model for the relation of cleaned width as a function of the standoff distance and considered the different structure of the water spray as well as a food specific cleaning behaviour.We validated the analytical model with experimental results by varying the equivalent nozzle diameter.