Food Safety and Plant Air Monitoring

Plant Air Monitoring Done Right
Many facilities are required to continuously monitor atmospheric conditions. Whether it is to ensure clean-room standards, maintain ventilation requirements, or to meet health and safety codes, air monitoring is often a necessary part of doing business. A typical food processing facility (Figure 4) requires internal air to travel from "clean" to "dirty" areas. Flow in the reverse direction is unacceptable, because the plant requires food handling areas to be contaminant-free. Internal air flows from the packaging department through both the processing and shipping areas. A high pressure zone is maintained in packaging and a low pressure zone is kept in both the shipping and receiving areas. This arrangement helps ensure the cleanliness of the food processing system and aids in conforming to health codes. In order to determine the stability of this positive-pressure environment, long term air monitoring is often required.	Airflow Sciences Corporation has considerable experience in developing customized data acquisition tools. A typical system would consist of numerous pressure sampling points. These would be at locations to provide a most representative measurement while minimizing installation costs and product line interference. Coupled with external atmospheric measurements such as temperature, wind speed, wind direction and pressure, an all-encompassing, real-time automated data retrieval system can be developed and implemented. Once this information is obtained, a control system can be developed to promote environmental quality. Does your facility require atmospheric monitoring? Give us a call and we'd be glad to help analyze your situation.

Figure 4. A Typical Food Processing Facility