Large-scale manufacturing of complex liquid formulations is challenging.
Most manufacturing processes that produce liquid formulated products (i.e. fertiliser) often employ viscosity or rheology measurements.
The problem with viscosity measurements is that they deliver only a single point measurement and the existing technologies are prone to error (i.e. Brookfield method is reported to have inaccuracies of ±10 %). However, viscometer are currently the only viable option for large diameter pipes or multi-phase systems to gather some information, however, there will still be a need to take a traditional off line measurement. Traditional rheometer are challenging to operate and the measurements are time-consuming; depending on your fluid the measurements range between 30 to 60 minutes.
This leads to a largely blind manufacturing, or forces the manufacturer to move to batch processing, where every batch has to be assessed with such off line measurements. In case a batch is out of specification it would be either reprocessed or used to dilute down high quality batches to a still acceptable level. In the worst-case scenario the whole batch must be scrapped, which introduces additional disposal costs, loss of production and has a negative environmental impact (between 6-20% (average 14%) of the production volume due to a lack of rheological monitoring*).
A University of Birmingham born spinout company called Rheality Ltd has taken on this challenge and developed a novel, patent pending technology that can monitor rheological changes live and in situ. The technology is based around transient energy release tracking and proprietary Big Data processing algorithms and incorporates a clever mechanical design.
This lunchtime lecture introduce the topic of rheology, the theory behind the technology and presents some case studies on selected fluids.
*figure based on personal market validation through the government funded ICURe program.
Daniel Hefft CEng MIAgrE is a food engineer and founder of the Engineering for Food and Drinks SIG. He is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Birmingham, the founder, director, co-inventor and CTO of Rheality and has been working for numerous years in the food industry. He is experienced in large-scale manufacturing management and process development.
