Elimination of the formation of biofilm in industrial pipes using enzyme cleaning technique

Abstract

Currently, there is a growing demand in how to eliminate the biofilm formed in industrial pipelines, especially in food, fermentation, and water treatment industry. However, the traditional techniques for CIP (cleaning in place) are usually ineffective, superficial, halfway, and do not clean or sterilize microbes located in the inner layers of the biofilm. A recent strategy for removing the biofilm in pipes is employing enzymes to clean it in the circulating water system under an optimal condition. However, how to operate and control the whole cleaning process is difficult. Here, we will introduce the strategy of enzyme cleaning to make it more appropriated and effective.•A modification of CIP method is proposed for higher efficiency by using N-acetylmuramide glycanohydrolase as catalysts whose optimal pH and temperature is 10±1 and 45±2°C, respectively.•The initial efficiency of enzyme cleaning was evaluated by testing the content of ATP in water sample using Clean-Trace™ (3M Corporation).•Lastly, the terminal water was tested with SLYM-BART™ (HACH Corporation) to find out whether there were biofilm-forming bacteria, such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa (Lakretz et al. (2011) [1]), Pseudomonas fluorescens (O’Toole and Kolter (1998) [2]), iron bacterium, etc.