Retrofitting and New Design of the Brewhouses of An Industrial Brewery

While following the general objective of modelling and optimizing the ''hot part'' of the brewing process, a detailed simulation model of the brewhouses of an industrial Belgian brewery has been developed within the framework of the simulation package Batches, The use of this simulation model has made possible a thorough study of the utilization rates of the brewhouses equipment which have clearly appeared to be generally under-used and sometimes largely oversized. Taking into account these observations, a new optimized configuration for the brewhouses, representing a notable reduction of the number of equipment items, has been suggested, A very large series of simulation runs have proven the feasibility of this alternative configuration, provided that a strict control of the production planning be enforced. An economic study has shown that the unit price of production capacity can be reduced by about 30% in comparison with the base case, when adopting the suggested configuration.