Greifensee, Zurich -- (SBWire) -- 04/15/2011 -- Recovering and re-using CO2 greatly reduces beer production costs. To ensure the quality of their recovered CO2, find out why Suntory Brewing chooses METTLER TOLEDO.

Leading brand in China
Established in 1998, Suntory Brewing (Kunshan) Co., Ltd. is another successful development of Japanese Suntory Co., Ltd. in China.

It is located in Kunshan City, Jiangsu Province and has an annual beer production capacity of 200,000 tons.

Reduced cost of CO2 use
CO2 is an extremely important raw material in beer production and in the past the brewery had to spend a vast amount of money to purchase high-purity CO2 from external sources. However, a substantial amount of high-quality CO2 is generated as a by-product during the beer fermentation process. By recovering and re-using this portion of CO2, production costs are greatly reduced.

Application
The CO2 recycling system of Suntory Brewing previously measured the purity of CO2 by means of manual sampling in the laboratory.

This method had two problems: firstly, manual measurement errors arose, and secondly, determining when to measure could not always promptly discover a change in CO2 purity, so appropriate measures could often not be adopted in time to avoid a waste of CO2.

To counteract this, Suntory took the decision to install in-line oxygen measuring equipment to monitor the processing efficiency of the CO2 recycling system. After comparing products of different brands the brewery chose a METTLER TOLEDO in-line oxygen measuring point comprising the InPro 6950 Gas sensor and M700 transmitter. From the information obtained from the system, engineers can easily calculate the purity of the recovered CO2.

Installation
The InPro 6950/M700 measuring point was installed at the CO2 dryer outlet to conduct in-line monitoring of oxygen content. The system can automatically issue an alarm in the event of abnormal quality in order to prevent a substandard CO2 supply on the one hand, and on the other, to alert engineers to take corresponding measures in the event of abnormal purity of recovered CO2.

Precise and continuous results
The improved in-line oxygen measuring system monitors the purity of CO2 more precisely than the previous off-line method. The METTLER TOLEDO system measures O2 continuously in real time and removes the errors that had been seen with manual measurement. And when the CO2 purity is low, the transmitter issues an alarm to prompt the operator to take countermeasures, thus ensuring the quality of supplied CO2 is always met and waste of CO2 is minimized.

If you want to minimize CO2 waste at your brewery, go to:
http://www.mt.com/InPro6950
http://www.mt.com/M700