Engineering Commons^™

Development Of A Noncontact Sensor For Monitoring Milk Coagulation And Cutting Time Prediction In Cheese Making, Molly D. Craft-Jenkins

Theses and Dissertations--Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering

Cheese products are manufactured more consistently and with better quality if the curd cutting time can be consistently selected. An optical sensor that accurately predicts cutting time has been developed for large cheese vats, but the initial cost of these sensors makes them uneconomical for small artisan cheese manufacturers. The small artisan cheese vats require an inexpensive sensor technology that can be implemented simply. The initial cost of purchasing a sensor and installing these sensors plus the need for a computational program for implementing the algorithm make this technology excessively expensive for these smaller cheese manufacturers. The objective of this …