This work presents the first known attempt to model the dairy business from a multiscale modelling perspective. The multiscale nature of the dairy industry is examined with emphasis on those key decision making and process scales involved in production. Decision making scales identified range from the investor level to the plant operator level, and encompass business, production, plant, and operational levels. The model considers scales from the production manager to the unit operation scale.
The cheese making process is used to demonstrate scale identification in the context of the important phenomena and other natural levels of scrutiny of interest to decision makers.
This work was a first step in the establishment of a multiscale system model capable of delivering information for process troubleshooting, scheduling, process and business optimization, and process control decision-making for the dairy industry. Here, only material transfer throughout a process, use of raw materials, and production of manufactured product is modelled. However, an implementation pathway for adding other models (such as the precipitation of milk protein which forms curd) to the system model is proposed.
The software implementation of the dairy industry multiscale model presented here tests the validity of the proposed:
• object model (object and collection classes) used to model unit operations and integrate them into a process,
• mechanisms for modelling material and energy streams,
• method to create simulations over variable time horizons.
The model was implemented using object oriented programming (OOP) methods in conjunction with technologies such as Visual Basic .NET and CAPE-OPEN. An OOP object model is presented which successfully enabled the construction of a
multiscale model of the cheese making process. Material content, unit operation, and raw milk supply models were integrated into the multiscale model. The model is capable of performing simulations over variable time horizons, from 1 second, to multiple years.
Mechanisms for modelling material streams, connecting unit operations, and controlling unit operation behaviour were implemented. Simple unit operations such as pumps and storage silos along with more complex unit operations, such as a cheese vat batch, were modelled.
Despite some simplifications to the model of the cheese making process, the simulations successfully reproduced the major features expected from the process and its constituent unit operations. Decision making information for process operators, plant managers, production managers, and the dairy business manager can be produced from the data generated.
The multiscale model can be made more sophisticated by extending the functionality of existing objects, and incorporating other scale partial models. However, increasing the number of reported variables by even a small number can quickly increase the data processing and storage demands of the model.
A unit operation’s operational state of existence at any point of time was proposed as a mechanism for integrating and recalculating lower scale partial models. This mechanism was successfully tested using a unit operation’s material content model and is presented here as a new concept in multiscale modelling.
The proposed modelling structure can be extended to include any number of partial models and any number of scales.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:canterbury.ac.nz/oai:ir.canterbury.ac.nz:10092/2146 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Hutchinson, Craig Alan |
| Publisher | University of Canterbury. Chemical and Process Engineering |
| Source Sets | University of Canterbury |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic thesis or dissertation, Text |
| Rights | Copyright Craig Alan Hutchinson, http://library.canterbury.ac.nz/thesis/etheses_copyright.shtml |
| Relation | NZCU |
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