Chillers for Dairy & Cheese

We provide the dairy & cheese industry with closed loop cooling systems. Standard modular, portable, and custom chillers are a few variations of equipment we can produce for your cheese or dairy processing plant.

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Application Description - Milk:

Maintaining milk at a cool temperature preserves it. Way back, when windmills and well pumps were invented, one of their first uses on the farm besides providing water for animals was for cooling milk to extend the storage life before being transported to the town market. The naturally cold underground water would be continuously pumped into a tub with containers of milk set in the tub to cool it after milking. This method of milk cooling was extremely popular before the arrival of refrigeration.

When refrigeration arrived in the 19th century, the equipment was fairly small. Early refrigeration did not have the ability to rapidly cool the large quantity of milk that might enter a storage tank in a short period of time. This problem was resolved through the development of an ice bank, a double-walled tank design, where water and cooling coils fill the space underneath and around the milk tank.

All day long, a small compressor and cooling system would slowly draw heat out of the water, while a second pump would continuously circulate the water around the coils. Ice eventually would build up around the coils, until it reached a thickness of about three inches surrounding each pipe, and the cooling system would then shut off. When the milking operation started only the milk agitator and the water circulation pump were needed to reduce the incoming milk to a temperature below 40 degrees. Because ice was not permitted to build up until it touched the storage tank wall, the milk did not get cold enough to freeze.                   

Dairy Chiller cows

This cooling method worked well for smaller dairies up to about 40 cows, but for large numbers of animals a better system was needed to rapidly cool the incoming warm milk. This is now done using a feature known as a plate chiller, or heat exchanger. Alternating stainless steel plates cause the milk to flow in a thin sheet across the plates, while cold water is circulated on the other side of the plates. Flattening out the milk flow permits quick, even cooling for all the milk, compared to a round tub where the center core does not cool as rapidly as the walls.

With the development of closed loop chillers, ice-bank chillers are typically no longer used. Instead the milk storage tank is a direct-cooling system with cooling coils embedded in the walls of the tank. This quickly pulls heat out of the milk, and process water is recirculated efficiently through a Koolant Koolers chiller. Once the milk has reached 40 °F (4 °C) and after milking is finished, only one or two cooling units need to occasionally run to maintain the correct temperature.

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Good, cold milk is only achieved through proper milk collection and cooling, which accounts for 30% of milk processing costs. The quality of milk is critically affected by the cooling time it takes to reduce the temperature of raw milk to 38 degrees F within a couple of hours of harvesting. From pre-cooling milk to the pasteurization process, high efficiency indirect and direct cooling can be achieved in a few ways with our robust Koolant Koolers products. Our reliable chillers have been designed for harsh environments especially when precise temperature control is critical. Our designs feature variable speed capacity systems and intelligent controls to enhance performance and achieve high energy efficiency.

Application Description - Cheese Products:

There are as many dairy based snack foods and cheese selections as there are creative minds to think of them. Traditional cheese production and cheesy snacks usually require chilled process water to maintain product quality and to extend equipment life. Many plants still utilize process water from a central cooling tower. This approach works well, but has the traditional problems of evaporation loss; fouled water contamination from dirt, dust, and debris; scale and corrosion in plant plumbing & heat exchangers; biological contamination; etc. The hidden cost of these problems are eliminated by utilizing discrete chillers located throughout your plant.

Today, individual closed loop chillers are often the most efficient means of providing cool water for each plant process. Our customers can size the cooling water supply to meet their changing requirements. After successful product launch, increased cooling capacity can be added as needed and scaled to the increase in production.  As mentioned above, our reliable Koolant Koolers chillers have been designed for harsh environments with precise temperature control. Each standard model is available in a range of cooling capacities. Our designs feature variable speed capacity systems and intelligent controls to enhance performance and achieve high energy efficiency.

Give us a call. You’re on your way to finding the Best Chiller value for your dairy applications.