Uso da condutividade elétrica para a determinação da concentração de NaOH na lavadora de garrafas de uma cervejaria

Abstract

Beer is produced on a large scale. Its production is stored in cans and bottles. The returnable bottles go through a washing process. For this cleaning to be carried out, an equipment known as a bottle washer is used, where the bottles come in dirty as they arrived from the consumer and go through four washing baths added with additives, NaOH and water spouts so that they can be cleaned. Currently, the monitoring of the NaOH concentration in the wash baths is performed by collecting samples that are sent to the laboratory and determined by means of acid-base titration. This method involves the labor demand, from the collection of the samples until the moment of the titration, besides time, as it implies in the preparation of glassware and reagents. Thus, it is interesting to develop a methodology that allows a faster and more reliable determination of NaOH concentration. In this sense, the electrical conductivity could be used as a parameter for the monitoring of the NaOH concentration in these baths, facilitating the bottle washing operation. For this case study, samples of these baths were collected for five months, measuring the NaOH concentration and its electrical conductivity, to evaluate the correlation between the methods, being that after the evaluation, method B of the use of the equation referring to generated For all the points obtained validated the statistical hypothesis