Optimisation of water usage in a brewery clean-in-place system using reference nets

The brewery industry is becoming increasingly aware of its water and energy usage due to stricter regulations, and environmental and economic incentives. An area where large improvements in water usage presents itself is the clean-in-place system. A significant portion of the total process water required in an industrial sized brewery is used during clean-in-place processes. Testing and optimisation of these industrial processes can be quickly and economically achieved using computer modelling and simulation tools. One such tool is the reference net, a subclass of object-oriented Petri nets. In order to predict the water usage and the potential for energy production from wastewater attributed to the clean-in-place plant in a brewery, the reference net formalism is used. Validation of the complete reference net system is undertaken using two sets of simulations, one set of simulations running an approximation of a standard brewery clean-in-place system and a second set implementing a fuzzy logic adaptive control for water reuse. The reference net is found to be a valid and efficient tool for quick prototyping of new and existing industrial sized brewery clean-in-place systems.