Evaluation of steel surface cleanliness level in dairies using the bioluminescence method.

摘要

The aim of this study was to evaluate the usefulness of bioluminescence in the determination of cleanliness of steel surfaces characterized by different roughness (0.6 and 0.8 micro m). The experiment was conducted in a dairy in northwestern Poland. The applicability of the method was assessed based on correlations between the number of relative light units (RLU) measured with a luminometer and microbial counts determined by the conventional microbiological method (cfu/cm2). The higher the roughness of surface, the higher the microbiological contamination measured by these methods. Microbial counts classifying an examined surface as clean, acceptably clean and unacceptable were the basis for predictions of RLU ranges. High levels of proportional correlation were obtained for these methods.