SCADA for BEER BREWING - RealFlex Technologies Ltd.

SCADA for BEER BREWING

CASE STUDIES

Norwegian brewery produces variety of ales and a very popular Christmas Ale which is always in great demand.

PROBLEM DESCRIPTION AND SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:

The firm needed a way to monitor beer temperature during fermentation and automatically adjust tank cooling zones and perform beer rotation when needed. If the beer is maintained at improper temperatures, the quality level is affected. If the correct temperature level is breached to an extended period of time, the brew has to be discarded.

The brewery also wished to easily change the batch it was brewing, as well as document the entire brewing process. This would allow for change-overs in response to consumer demand, as well as beer quality documentation. Demand for certain beers is seasonal so an extensive amount of switching of batches occurs at the plant. Around thirty tanks need to be simultaneously monitored; with various temperature, pH and accumulation calculation points present, over 2000 points are in the database.

RealFlex monitors the temperature in each tank; automatically opening cooling valves when needed. The recipe loader allows switching between production of different batches. The setpoints of time and temperature can be changed from a recipe picture for each tank to save time. RealFlex Control Sequence Language (CSL) is used to calculate the total quantity of each type of beer. Scheduled CSLs are used to snap the data to disk at regular intervals. This avoids losing manually entered data in such cases as UPS failure. The report building function documents the process, the temperature versus the setpoint (recipe) is stored and presented in the same trend. This allows any temperature violation to be easily seen. The RealFlex Recipe builder is used to allow a changeover of frequently occurring processes (batches).

The fermentation process is controlled, avoiding any costly system malfunctions. Operators now concentrate on improving the quality of the beer rather than manual tasks. Switching production between different batches is simple and less time consuming saving expensive set-up time.