Centrifuge Milk

Oh right, we have been discussing different application of centrifuge ah.. machines that spin uhm.. using centrifugal force to separate uhm.. substances of different densities. Well today, I want to go over the way centrifuges are used in the dairy industry. In the dairy industry, you have the situation where there are lots of uh.. consumers creating a huge demand for dairy products you know, like milk. Any time you are dealing with consumers, product consistency is really key. But when the scale of your industry operation is very large, maintaining this consistency can be uhm.. a little tricky. Say your product is milk, one variable you have to carefully control is the fat content in your products. You know, whole milk, 2% milk or skimmed milk. They all have specific uhm.. quantity of fat. You want to make sure there is as little variation as possible uh.. between batches of the same kind of milk produced at different plants. And the way you do this is by using a centrifuge for a process called separation, where the cream the uh.. fat is extracted from natural milk leaving behind skimm milk. Later, precise amount of milk fat can be added back into the skimmed milk. This standardizes the fat content in each of your milk products. 2%, half and half, that kind of thing. OK, so, before the centrifuge came into use, dairy farmer separated milk by allowing gravity to perform the process naturally. When it's allowed to set, milk eventually forms 2 layers uhm.. with the fat rising to the surface. Dairy farmers condense skims off that fat and preserve the milk beneath. Of course the main problem with this process was that it was well... inefficient. I bet you can imagine because of all that waiting time while gravity separated the skim milk from the uh.. from the cream. When the first cream separator was invented in 1877, it operated as a centrifuge, spinning the milk at the speed of 4000 revolutions per minute. The cream, which is uh.. lighter than the skim milk, gather in the middle of the centrifuge, and the skim milk travel to the outer rim. This centrifuge obviously separate the milk much faster than uhm.. gravity alone. And it was also capable of removing far more fat than the gravity method. It was quite a beneficial invention and it uh.. it caught the attention of other scientists who started to work on improving it. Modern centrifuge separators are huge machines capable of processing uh.. millions of pounds of milk per day and can now remove as much as 99.92% of the fat from skim milk. This provides dairy producer with a lot of uhm.. control over exactly how much fat their varied milk products contain and it ensures that this uhm.. fat content will be consistent between different plants and different batches. They're all meet the same standards. Now there's another issue dairy producers have to considered. It has to do with preservation of perishable goods, food that will go bad quickly. Since it takes time to transport milk from the dairy farms to the plants, and then to process and distribute the milk uhm.. dairy products would spoil before they ever reach the consumers if they were uhm.. left untreated. And this is where the second important use of centrifuge in the dairy industry comes in: clarification. In the commercial milk industry, it is absolutely essential to make sure that bacteria uhm.. that would decrease the …..... of dairy products are removed from the milk before it gets packaged. Milk and bacterial spore are different density so they are separated with spun at high at uhm high speed. Unclarified milk is added to the centrifuge near its edges and as the liquid is spun around, the bacteria pushed outward against the rim. The milk, which is lighter, moves into the central of the centrifuge and is pumped out. The clarification of milk can extended …. by as much as 25%. As you can see, in the dairy industry, centrifuges perform two very important uhm.. functions. Separation and clarification help to standardize and preserve milk so that the dairy industry can mark its consistence and long-lasting products