Published by Leonardo Calcagno
The food and beverage processing industry encompasses a wide range of sectors, including dairy, meat, baked goods, canned foods, and more. Valves specifically designed for this industry must possess extremely high precision to meet stringent cleanliness and sterility requirements.
Core Role of Food and Beverage Valves
As critical components for achieving process control and automation, valves play a vital role in the food and beverage processing industry.
- Ensuring Quality Stability: Control valves effectively ensure consistent product quality by reducing process variables, thereby enhancing overall production efficiency.
- Preventing Contamination Risks: Valves serve as an important barrier against hazardous pathogenic organisms in food. For instance, the tight shut-off characteristics of ball valves or sanitary butterfly valves effectively prevent product leakage and cross-contamination.
- Improving Operational Benefits: When properly maintained, valves help manufacturers increase output, extend equipment runtime, and significantly reduce costly unplanned downtime.
- Driving Automation: Faced with rising labor costs and increasingly stringent food safety regulations, automation has become a core driver for the industry. Valves play an indispensable role in this, significantly boosting production efficiency while ensuring quality.
Therefore, it is no exaggeration to say that selecting the appropriate valves is an important part of building a company’s core competitive advantage.
Main Types of Valves in Food Processing
Valves are used for opening/closing pipelines, controlling flow direction, and regulating medium parameters (temperature, pressure, and flow). Generally, valves for food and beverage processing can be divided into two main categories: Sanitary Valves and Industrial Valves.
Sanitary Valves
Sanitary valves come into direct contact with the food or beverage product and therefore must meet extremely high cleanability standards to ensure food safety.
- Seat Valves: This is the most common valve type in this field, suitable for on/off control, flow path diversion, or flow regulation. Their advantage lies in the fact that all wetted parts are easy to clean and maintain thoroughly, and they come in various configurations to fit almost any piping system.
- Mix-Proof Valves: When multiple product lines share the same pipeline, posing a risk of cross-contamination, mix-proof valves are the ideal solution. They provide double block and bleed functionality, enabling safe isolation when producing different products.
- Butterfly Valves: In some sanitary applications, butterfly valves can serve as a cost-effective alternative to seat valves. Their compact structure helps save space in complex production lines and facilitates direct maintenance.
Industrial Valves
Industrial valves do not come into direct contact with the product; therefore, they have lower cleanability requirements and fewer design restrictions. Food manufacturers utilize industrial valves of various shapes and sizes—including ball valves, butterfly valves, gate valves, plug valves, globe valves, etc.—based on specific needs in non-core process areas.
- Ball Valves & Butterfly Valves: Both are often used as alternatives for shut-off valves. Ball valves offer superior shut-off performance and are suitable for smaller pipe diameters; butterfly valves, being lighter in weight and lower in manufacturing cost, are more suitable for large-diameter applications.
- Gate Valves: Typically used in steam systems, their slow opening/closing characteristic helps reduce the interaction between steam and condensate during system start-up and limits flash steam generation.
- Angled Seat Valves: Often used in systems requiring reliable shut-off against pressurized fluids; their special design effectively mitigates water hammer effects during actuator operation.
Key Role of Valves in Temperature Control
In the food and beverage industry, temperature is a core process variable critical to product quality and safety. Improper control can lead to reduced efficiency at best, and product loss at worst. Therefore, producers are extremely cautious about it.
Precise temperature control relies on high-performance control valves. Valves involved in temperature control must be able to:
- Respond Rapidly, quickly reaching the process setpoint.
- Maintain High Accuracy, stabilizing the temperature during batch cycles and avoiding fluctuations.
- Possess Good Repeatability, responding quickly to changes in batch setpoints.
In batch operations, reducing batch cycle time is key to improving profitability.
Fast heat-up/cool-down times may require valves with high flow capacity, such as butterfly valves or full-bore ball valves.
If finer throttling control is needed, segmented ball valves or globe valves are better choices.
Three Core Factors Influencing Valve Selection
Making the correct choice among the numerous types of valves requires systematic consideration. The following three factors are central to the selection decision:
- Cleanability: This is the primary step in ensuring food safety and hygiene. First, it must be determined whether the valve will contact the product, which directly dictates whether a sanitary or industrial grade valve should be selected.
- Material Compatibility: Improper material selection can lead to disastrous consequences, ranging from affecting product quality to causing contamination of the final product due to corrosion or foreign matter. 316 stainless steel is the most commonly used valve body material in the food industry. For more corrosive or demanding process media, special materials like AL-6XN or Hastelloy need to be considered. Trim components (such as seats, seals) are often made from non-metallic elastomers.
- Maintainability: Implementing a regular preventive maintenance program is a best practice for ensuring stable operation in food and beverage plants, ultimately saving time and costs.
Summary
Although small in size, valves are a critical link in the automation and safety assurance systems of the food and beverage industry. Valves in this sector must possess extremely high precision to cope with strict cleanliness and sterility requirements.
Photo by Wesley Davi