Performance Digital Twin for the Food & Beverage Industry

Virtually every food and beverage company is talking about innovation and digitalization. Staying ahead in the innovation race requires leveraging the advantages of digitalization in each of the three steps of the value chain: Ideation, Realization and Utilization. A common challenge in the food industry is bringing new products to market by effectively scaling up the process. This requires paying attention to quality during production and ensuring process efficiency by optimizing operating conditions.

How do fluid flow and hydrodynamic behavior in food processing equipment affect the yield and throughput? Can we look at the fundamentals of processes in order to achieve macro level gains in efficiency and energy savings? Which of such unit operations can be investigated from fundamental perspective using simulations? Are there possibilities to utilize such methods for bottling and packaging as well? What are the extents of saving one can realize?

We will attempt to answer some of these questions in this presentation based on examples and cases studies.

From an engineering perspective, the topics covered will include stirred vessels, dispersing gas and solids in liquids, behavior of high viscosity fluids, fluid structure interactions in mixing vessels, and optimization of process equipment. The tools and methods we discuss are generally termed as the Performance Digital Twin. The key enabling technologies include Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and particle modeling with Discrete Element Method (DEM).