Wireless Solutions Increase Product Safety in the Food and Personal Care Industry

The purity of ingredients is important for all manufacturing processes, but it’s especially critical for food and personal care products. These processes routinely require pipes to transport liquid to the production line. However, physical and chemical residues must be regularly removed from the pipes to maintain quality standards. Cleaning the pipes generally involves pumping water or some other cleaning liquid through the pipes at a desired temperature range. Wireless monitors can improve the accuracy of this temperature and automatically provide alerts if the temperature falls out of range.

A multinational manufacturer of personal and household care products needed to maintain the temperature of the cleaning liquid within one degree Celsius (C) of the target temperature. This requirement was especially difficult to achieve given that the temperature of the operating environment could range from 20 to 85ºC (68 to 185ºF). This manufacturer couldn’t guarantee the pipe had been cleaned appropriately if it couldn’t ensure the water temperature remained within the desired range throughout the length of the pipe. The primary problem with this requirement was obtaining a method of accurately measuring the water’s temperature through the entire pipe.

The solution was to install a wireless temperature monitoring system from OMEGA such as the wireless transmitters and receivers with extended distance. These systems include a series of temperature sensor probes located along the pipe that capture and transmit the temperature of the cleaning liquid. For example, the RTD-to-wireless connector transmitter system has over 70 surface temperature sensors and a 48-channel receiver to receive the temperature data from these sensors; software from OMEGA then monitors this data and logs it in real-time. This software normally provides accuracy to the nearest degree C, but OMEGA increased its accuracy to 0.1 degree C due to the unique specific requirements of this customer.

The desired temperature range of the water can be preset so that alarms can then alert operators to the problem if the water temperature fluctuates beyond this acceptable range. The OMEGA product solutions are wireless, allowing the temperature probes to be easily moved to other pipes as needed without installing or removing wiring. The customer can thus ensure that the pipes have been cleaned according to the required specifications.