Ice Pigging saves major soft drinks factory from contamination build-up

Nivalis were recently called in to a major UK soft drinks factory to help clean biologically contaminated sections of pipework. (Biofilm prevention is a constant challenge for manufacturers in the drinks and food industry.)

Other pipe cleaning techniques using chemicals, solid structures and water had already been utilised on the pipework. While these had all worked well in cleaning out the pipelines, they had not met the hygienic quality standards of the factory. 

Cue, the Ice Pig. 

Our highly effective pipe cleaning technology using ice and a liquid slurry to form a semi-solid plug, known as the 'Ice Pig', was brought in to carry out 13 seperate operations during a 48-hour production shutdown. 

Despite the lines already having been "cleaned" using other techniques, our Ice Pigging process removed visible particles and bioflim-like residue from a number of sections. 

Working closely with the in-house team we successfully cleaned all requested pipelines, including an additional section which was identified during the works. 

We repeated the Ice Pigging process for each section until visually clean ice was observed at each outlet - each process took between 5 and 10 minutes from initiation to completion.  

The customer was extremely pleased with our operations and was happy that the cleaning process had met all of their hygienic quality standards for the factory. 

This was a great project to work on and another excellent example of how effective and reliable Ice Pigging is.