Speaker
Main supervisor (name and email)<br>and his / her institution
MSimon@ufh.ac.za
Apply to be<br> considered for a student <br> award (Yes / No)?
NO
Level for award<br> (Hons, MSc, <br> PhD, N/A)?
PhD
Abstract content <br> (Max 300 words)<br><a href="http://events.saip.org.za/getFile.py/access?resId=0&materialId=0&confId=34" target="_blank">Formatting &<br>Special chars</a>
This paper presents the performance evaluation of a direct expansion bulk milk cooler (BMC) used on a dairy farm in the Eastern Cape. The study was carried out on an existing dairy farm with an average of 800 cows in milking. The study focused on establishing the performance of BMC by the South African National Standards (SANS) 708:2007 for BMC’s tanks. The performance evaluation of the BMC’s considered morning and afternoon milking periods at an everyday collection of milk. A data acquisition system was installed to measure power consumption, the temperature of raw milk before cooling commences, the BMC room temperature, relative humidity, and ambient temperature. The volume of milk produced per every milking time was extracted from the on-farm records from fourth quadrant software. The cooling capacity of the BMC was determined for the two different milking times. The study revealed that an average of 60% of the day's milk extracted during the first milking. During this first milking, raw milk at an average temperature of 32°C attained a storage temperature of 4°C in 3 hours inclusive of the milking time. Also, after the last milking, the BMC operated for an average duration of 1.5 hours to before the raw milk attained the safe storage temperature. This short duration of cooling was owing to the slightly lower temperature lift of the stored milk from the storage temperature and also because of the volume of milk during that milking time which was lower than that of the morning milking time. The cooling capacity of the bulk milk tank was reduced due to an increased ambient temperature. Also, lower relative humidity increased the cooling capacity of the BMC and a decrease in the room temperature for the BMC lowered the cooling duration for the milk.
Please indicate whether<br>this abstract may be<br>published online<br>(Yes / No)
YES
Would you like to <br> submit a short paper <br> for the Conference <br> Proceedings (Yes / No)?
YES
