Simulation of Liquid Food Processes in Modelica

Traditionally, liquid food processing equipment has
been designed and engineered from a static
perspective, where it has been taken for granted
that dynamic behaviour easily could be handled by
“add on” of control equipment such as sensors and
computers with control programs including control
loops. However, as production demands, e.g.
mixing accuracy, are escalated, this approach fails,
and the importance of simulating the dynamics of
the system becomes crucial. A tool that makes it
possible to minimise the cost and time for building
prototypes and making experiments would be of
considerable value, particularly if the tool enables
reuse of earlier work. Equally important is the
possibility to test various design ideas to improve
the equipment performance to en extent that
otherwise would not be conceivable.
This article describes how the Modelica based
tool Dymola1 has been used to build up a library
(“FoodProcessing”) primarily aiming at simulating
certain dynamic behaviour in liquid food
processing plants, particularly characterised by
incompressible fluids with complex rheologic
behaviour, transport delays and dynamically
changing concentration