GEA evaporator for major Czech dairy

Prague – Madeta AS, a major private dairy company in the Czech Republic, has awarded GEA Group a contract for a complete turn-key evaporator to process sweet whey.

The main selection criteria was for a system offering the lowest environmental impact and with the lowest running costs, according to Petr Payer from Madeta’s technical department,

“Those two aspects will certainly become more and more important in the future for dairy industrials and adopting this solution was a good way to ensure our future profitability,” said Payer

With an evaporative capacity of 12.5 tonnes/hour this new plant limits the use of live steam to heat treatment so has very low energy consumption.

The principle relies on the use of the mechanical vapour recompression also called MVR technology. This allows a high concentration of whey to be achieved with nearly 500kg/h less live steam than would have been used with a traditional design.

This represents nearly Euro80k/year economy on running costs and offers a high level of flexibility.

GEA has also adopted a “combi” design where the two effects of the evaporator are included in one single body, to minimise the footprint and associated costs such as those for buildings and platforms.