AUTOMATED INSTALLATION FOR MILK COOLING USING A NATURAL COOLING AGENT

In the chain from milk production to the sale of dairy products, the process of ensuring the required temperature is the main one. Moreover, to cool the milk, the tempera-ture of the cooling agent should be above milk freezing. Taking into account the fact that the process of cooling and storing milk in a chilled form imposes strict requirements for reliability and quality of management on farms, compressor refrigeration units have been used in recent years despite high energy consumption. Theanalysis of technical solu-tions in this direction by the example of farms of the Altai and Novosibirsk Regions showed that during the greatest boom of the livestock industry, film-tray, spray-cooling tow-er, and pipe and tank installations using natural cooling agents were widely used. Taking into account the climatic features of the area when choosing water cooling units as an intermediate coolant made it possible to significantly reduce energy consumption for milk cooling especially in winter. However, the complexity of controlling the process of preparing the intermediate coolant with unpredictable environmental parameters did not allow for high reliability and quality of manual control. A device for cooling the in-termediate coolant with the main -natural cold in winter with an automatic direct-acting regulator that provides the required operating mode of the cooling unit is proposed. The variants of automatic device operation both when the outdoor air temperature decreases and increases are con-sidered. An automated installation for cooling the interme-diate coolant with natural cold may be recommended both for cattle farms and processing enterprises