Monitoring the Different Stages of Industrial Cleaning using Ultrasonic Sensors

Clean-in-Place (CIP) technologies use a combination of time, temperature, chemicals and mechanical force (caused by flowing water) to clean processing equipment in the food and drink, pharmaceutical and fast moving consumer goods sectors. One of the major challenges facing CIP processes is that they often over clean affecting a factory’s productivity and environmental impact. This paper presents an ultrasonic sensor method which can be used to monitor and therefor optimize the cleaning of pipe work. In this work we monitor the cleaning of different industrially relevant fouling materials in a flat pipe section. As each fouling material has different cleaning stages we propose the use of machine learning techniques to identify these stages of cleaning and determine when the pipe is clean.