In-Place Cleaning
M Walton, Society of Dairy Technology, Appleby in Westmorland, UK
ª 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
Cleaning in place (CIP) is a vital discipline within the
modern food, dairy, and beverage processing industry.
Dairy and beverage have tended to lead the way due to
the major products being liquid and the process equip-
ment lending itself to CIP. However, many food or
pharmaceutical operations now incorporate CIP and the
technology is therefore much more common.
In the 1990 edition of the Society of Dairy Technology
(SDT) Manual Cleaning In Place, CIP was defined as ‘‘The
cleaning of complete items of plant or pipeline circuits
without dismantling or opening of the equipment and
with little or no manual involvement on the part of the
operator. The process involves the jetting or spraying of
surfaces or circulation of cleaning solutions through the
plant under conditions of increased turbulence and flow
velocity.’’ This was taken from the National Dairymens
Association (NDA) Chemical Safety Code, 1985, and
while the NDA has been superseded, their definition of
CIP is still felt to be quite appropriate.
Practice in the Dairy Industry
The modern dairy plant, be it for liquid milk or the
multitude of other dairy products, will have at least
two CIP sets at its heart; it is generally accepted as
best practice that raw and finished product should be
segregated to avoid cross-contamination. The raw milk
CIP set will be responsible for cleaning the raw milk
silos and associated milk intake pipe-work along with
any in-line coolers and filters including transfer lines
to the pasteurizer. It is at this point that the segrega-
tion between raw and finished (pasteurized) products
is maintained. In many cases the pasteurizer with its
associated items of processing equipment such as
homogenizer, separator, and standardization unit will
be cleaned together. The cleaning operation can
be single-stage or two-stage, but the principle of sin-
gle use remains. In a few sites, a partial recovery
system may be used. There are benefits and drawbacks
in each type of system and these will be discussed in
more detail later. The finished milk CIP set will clean
all items of plant that are used to store, process, and
pack finished or pasteurized product. It is vital that
this cleaning equipment be maintained to the highest
standards in order to ensure good plant hygiene and
to avoid product contamination, either physical or
microbiological, that would have an adverse effect on
final product quality or shelf-life.
Outline of a CIP System
The main stages of CIP are similar to any other standard
cleaning routine: removal of gross debris (product purge);
pre-rinse; detergent (normally acid- or caustic-based);
intermediate rinse; second detergent if applicable; inter-
mediate rinse; disinfectant; and final rinse with potable
water. The diluted detergents are generally stored in
tanks as part of the CIP unit or CIP set and will be built
up into a fully operational CIP set with valves, manifolds,
and interconnecting pipe-work, including an automated
control system.
The design of the CIP set will depend on the duty
required. Other considerations such as available space
and budget constraints do influence the design but
making compromises at the design stage is not recom-
mended, as poor CIP performance can have a
significant impact on product quality. Figure 1
shows a four-tank partial recovery system with a sin-
gle channel or CIP route operation. On larger sets,
there can be five or six separate channels linked by
common inlet and outlet manifolds. Other configura-
tions are possible, with or without a rinse recovery
tank. It is quite unusual to find recovered disinfectant
storage tanks as these require very close management
and can easily become contaminated leading to poten-
tially serious consequences; hence, the tank denoted as
‘utility’ in Figure 1 when used for disinfection is
likely to be of single use.
Most CIP sets have some degree of automation, the
most basic being a set of timers to open and close auto-
matic valves in a particular programmed sequence at
specific times. More sophisticated sets incorporate signif-
icant levels of field instrumentation with sensors, usually
mounted in-line to monitor flow, temperature, pressure,
conductivity, turbidity, etc. Control of detergent concen-
tration is usually automated and the most common
configuration is a control conductivity probe situated in
a recirculation loop to ensure good mixing when extra
detergent is added to the solution.
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284 Plant and Equipment | In-Place Cleaning
T F
C
CIP ret
CIP out
Alkali Acid
T water
Steam
P PT PT
F
Filter
FD
FD
Figure 1 Single-channel, four-tank partial recovery CIP system.
Detergents and Disinfectants
In the dairy industry, the most common type of detergent
is a caustic soda-based product, quite often containing a
blend of sequestrants, surfactants, and other additives to
assist with the cleaning task. The detergent also needs to
be compatible with the prevailing water hardness condi-
tions in order to prevent scale deposition, especially
during rinsing. The selection of the correct detergent is
a specialist activity and needs to take into account factors
such as materials of construction, soiling type and levels,
and product safety. The effectiveness of the caustic soda-
based material is heavily influenced by the specific blend
of additives and these are designed to remove dairy soils
such as fat, protein, and more complex molecules and
structures that are created by the process or simply by
heat such as calcium carbonate. In certain circumstances,
acidic detergents are used; these are often based on phos-
phoric or nitric acid or blends of the two and are found to
be effective at removing inorganic deposits in dairy pro-
cessing plants.
Disinfectant solutions can generally be divided into
oxidizing and non-oxidizing products, the former being
more common for CIP use as they tend to be more effica-
cious and have a lower tendency to foaming that can lead
to rinsing difficulties. The traditional dairy disinfectant was
sodium hypochlorite, a very cost-effective product for CIP
disinfection but with the major drawback for dairy CIP of
Alkali
Acid
Water
Other
Recovered
Utility
tank
PT PT
Sanitizer
being corrosive to stainless steel. It is now more common to
utilize an equilibrium mixture of hydrogen peroxide and
acetic acid – peracetic acid – and this is commercially avail-
able, often supplied at 5 or 15% activity.
Application in Dairy Equipment
The four main types of equipment encountered in a
typical dairy situation are pipelines, vessels, fillers, and
cheesemaking equipment. These are all normally cleaned
using CIP and it is important to ensure that each is
cleaned in the correct manner, for example, to clean a
pipe effectively, turbulent flow should be achieved. As a
generally accepted ‘rule of thumb’ the flow rate required
to achieve turbulent flow and therefore provide optimal
cleaning is around 1.8 ms 1.
Fillers and complex items such as cheesemaking
equipment will require purpose-built cleaning and spray
systems installed within the plant to ensure good cover-
age. In some cases, there is a requirement to clean internal
surfaces via CIP and also to include external surfaces,
such as on a liquid milk filler, and utilize a specific,
permanently installed foam cleaning system.
All tanks and process vessels will include a spray
device of some description. Traditionally this was a
simple spray ball, which is now being superseded by
the use of rotating spray heads that provide a much

more effective clean and have the added benefit of lower
water consumption.
See also: Biogenic Amines. Hazard Analysis and
Critical Control Points: Processing Plants. Utilities and
Effluent Treatment: Design and Operation of Dairy
Effluent Treatment Plants.
Plant and Equipment | In-Place Cleaning 285
Further Reading
Seiberling DA (ed.) (2007) Clean-in-Place for Biopharmaceutical
Processes (Drugs and the Pharmaceutical Sciences), 1st edn.
Informa HealthCare. ISBN-13: 978-0849340697.
Tamime AY (ed.) (2008) Cleaning-in-Place: Dairy, Food and Beverage
Operations, 3rd edn. Wiley-Blackwell in association with the Society
of Dairy Technology. ISBN-13:978-14051-5503-8.