Miller Magazine Issue: 154 October 2022

72 MILLER / OCTOBER 2022 TECHNOLOGY PLATFORM Dirk-Michael Fleck Senior Advisor Biorefinery Milling Solutions Bühler AG Grain mills produce the flour we need to make bread, pasta and animal feed – but that’s not all. Starch mills also produce intermediate products used e.g. for recyclable packaging. Dirk-Michael Fleck, Senior Advisor Biorefinery at Bühler’s Milling Solutions Business Area explains how new grain processing solutions can be connected in a sustainable and intelligent way. How insects and grain mills are improving sustainability As a rule, grain is generally used to make flour but by using specifically adapted grinding and separation pro- cesses, other products such as starch, protein, fiber and germs can also be obtained from different types of grain. These semi-finished products form the basis for a number of end products including modified starch, glucose, alco- hol, gluten and organic fibers. The Milling Solutions Biore- finery Segment of Bühler is specialized in designing and building the plants for manufacturing intermediate prod- ucts such as these. Other business units offer solutions for the downstream value chain. Dirk-Michael Fleck, we are all familiar with flour mills, but you are mainly involved in engineering and building starch mills. What’s the difference? Dirk-Michael Fleck: Comparing a flour mill with a starch mill is like comparing a road system of a large city with an intercity highway. Both are roads, but whereas one is used for local transport services, the other is a high-speed link between two cities. In the same way, while a flour mill needs to be able to produce different qualities and quan- tities of flour, a starch mill must be as simple and robust as possible in order to produce consistently a specific quality of flour at high capacity. What does that require in terms of design and operation? A starch mill has to be designed to fit perfectly into the operating environment of a highly modern biorefinery. Up- stream and downstream processes must be seamlessly in- terlinked, and when it is in fully automated 24/7 operation, the mill must continuously supply a constant product quality for the downstream process. This is particularly important because starting and stopping wet separation and biotech- nological processes cause great expenses and losses. The mill has to be fully automated and operate safely at high capacity in order to achieve economic efficiency. A medi- um-sized starch mill, therefore, has a capacity of 800 t/24 h.