Miller Magazine Issue: 147 March 2022

90 COVER STORY MILLER / march 2022 The flour mill laboratory has many missions. The main purpose of the mill laboratory is to check and evaluate the quality of incoming wheat and to make sure that the produced flour varieties are consistently suitable for their customers' purposes. The laboratory also performs various routine tests like moisture, ash and color of inter- mediate materials in the mill as required to optimize mill performance by maintaining machine adjustments. The mill laboratory provides miller with the data which is important to make many decisions related to wheat blending, wheat conditioning, mill adjustment, and flour blending. But these days routine analyses besides ad- ditional tests such as starch damage of intermediate streams that may be affected by mill settings are carried out "on stream" on line equipment. The mill laboratory should be located in a separate building of the mill, to avoid any possibility of vibration that can affect instrument performance. The laboratory space should be divided into sections allocated to the wheat section, wheat conditioning and milling, analysis and dough testing, flour sample storage, and baking. If the mill has a research and development department a separate section should be allocated in the laboratory for quality control of special products pro- duced in the mill. The environmental conditions (relative humidity and temperature) play a very important role in the results and replication of tests; therefore, the environment of the mill laboratory should be controlled. The equipment that must be present in the laboratory of the mill varies according to the aims and objectives of the mill. A quite extensive laboratory could include equipment for measuring a range of samples, such as bulk density, dockage, single kernel analysis, Hagberg Falling Number, hardness, moisture, protein, gluten ash, color, Bran Specks starch damage, particle size, dough rheology, laboratory mill, NIR (near-infrared) and baking. Dough rheology measurements can be achieved by equipment such as Farinograph, Extensograph, amylo- graph, alveograph, mixolab. Wheat flour products verities are highly wide and bread production procedure is changed from one customer to another. In other words, the mill supplies a wide range of flour qualities to a large number of customers with vary- Industry 4.0 – digitalization – opened up new opportunities in the mill industry. This also affects the equipment of the mill laboratory. The term "Laboratory 4.0" stands for innovative automation concepts and digitalization in everyday laboratory work. The pressure for innovation and efficiency is making the laboratory equipment industry rethink the way they operate their equipment. Laboratory 4.0 for flour mill Prof. Farhan Alfin Food Engineer and Milling Technologist