Presenter: Simon Henke, Technical University Munich, Chair of Process Engineering of Disperse Systems, Germany. Coauthor(s): Jakob Aps, Johannes Tippmann, Jens Voigt, and Karl Sommer, Technical University Munich, Chair of Process Engineering of Disperse Systems, Germany.
The lautering process is the most time-consuming step of the production of wort. Besides mash filters, the lauter tun is still the most common device for mash filtration in the brewhouse because no other separation technique has been established. For this reason, equipment suppliers have done a lot of development work on existing lauter tuns, which has led to an acceleration of this filtration step. Nevertheless, there are still many open questions regarding the performance of mash filtration in the lauter tun, especially causes of filtration problems during this unit operation have not been fully investigated. High flow rates through the filter cake often lead to increased compaction of the compressible filter cake. This work investigates how false bottoms with different free passage areas influence the lautering performance and the composition of the grain cake. For this reason a pilot-scale glass lauter tun was constructed, which offers the opportunity to make an image analysis of the grain cake during the whole process. A double-walled, heatable shell assures constant temperatures up to 194°F over the entire lautering time, so that a negative influence on the filtration result by decreasing mash temperature is excluded. The lauter tun is equipped with four different false bottoms, with defined free passage areas between 6 and 20%, which cover the range of available industrial-scale systems. Besides the optical analysis, the most important physical parameters of lauter wort are recorded in-line. The presented filtration equations allow the determination of filter cake permeability and the development of permeability during the filtration with these measurements. The experiments showed a correlation between the free passage area of the false bottom and the permeability of the grain cake.
Simon Henke graduated from Technical University Munich in 2009 with a degree in engineering for brewing sciences and beverage technology. In 2010 he started his work at the Chair of Process Engineering of Disperse Systems, TU Munich, as a research associate. His fields of activity are mass transport phenomena during the mashing process and filtration projects in the brewhouse. He is responsible for the pilot plant brewery at the Chair of Process Engineering of Disperse Systems and is jointly involved in dispensing technology projects.
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