Diseño e implementación de un sistema de almacenamiento de cebada inteligente para la Maltería de Tibitó, integrando tecnologías de medición de temperatura, PLC y SCADA

Abstract

There are not many companies, especially in Colombia, that provide monitoring and control solutions for stored barley. In addition, the solutions are expensive and are not always integrated in the best way to the supervision systems that companies have installed. This is the case of the Tibitó malthouse, which hired a leading Brazilian company in intelligent storage systems in silos, for the implementation of a temperature monitoring system for stored barley. The installed system was completely independent and only the contractor could carry out maintenance. With the passing of time, this system began to show failures and since it was a foreign company without representation in Colombia, the support had to be done remotely or by telephone. The solutions presented by Widitec, a contracted Brazilian company, turned out to be very expensive because they had to include the export of spare parts and the transfer of technical personnel from Brazil, as well as their stay and all travel expenses incurred during the time they were performing maintenance on the system. In addition, such a system consists of outdated technology and it was necessary to migrate to new devices that greatly increased the cost of putting the system back into operation. Due to budget constraints, the malting facility was unable to make the switch and the system became nothing more than a landscape. This project consisted of taking the system that was installed by the Brazilian multinational Widitec, disassembling it almost in its entirety and only leaving the temperature probes that were in each barley storage silo mounted. These temperature probes were integrated into a totally new system, updated and adapted to the new automation and control technologies that the Tibitó malthouse factory has. Because it is a new system, the temperature signals from the sensors installed in the probes had to be conditioned. For this, the concentrator board of the old system was used and the conditioning devices were installed, in order to then bring the converted signals to the PLC of the Tibitó malthouse. Here it was processed and screens were created in the SCADA system for visualization. Which currently has the malting plant installed and controls all production processes. As a final result, an integrated intelligent storage system was obtained, composed of: • 12 barley storage silos with constant monitoring of 10 temperature measurement points, located in the middle of the silo and covering its entire height. • Alarms that indicate when the barley storage temperature is exceeded, allowing a rapid reaction that prevents grain degeneration. • Identification and calculation of barley stored in each of the silos, average temperature of the barley stored and the storage capacity of each silo.