As a part of their continuous improvement projects a customer approached IDS to increase salt absorption into their curd. The solution proposed was to split the existing salting system into two parts, and then salt at two separate points during the cheese making process.
In order to keep the system as streamline as possible and minimise the complexity overall, we chose to piggy back off the feed lines of existing salt system from the salt room to fill a second hopper. We then installed a duplicate blow line to feed air to under a Rotary Valve to blow the salt down to the curd using a loss in weight system to control speed of the RV. The salt was distributed via an IDS linear rail, to a curd mat levelled by an IDS auger prior to salting.
The operators were then able to select on the HMI the volume of salting required for each particular recipe, and the split of salt addition between the two salt points. It also allowed for redundancy if one of the salting feeds were to block, they could still apply sufficient salt.
Once installed and commissioned salt absorption increased to such a high level that they were able to reduce their daily salt usage to 1/3, and greatly reduced downstream further processing before the salty whey could be pumped to waste.
