Control and Supervision for an Industrial Grain Dryer

Abstract

Automation and control of processes in a food industry is a very important aim. The main reasons are: guaranteeing a better quality of the final product, reducing cost time and improving the use of the raw materials. Specifically, drying and storage grain industries have plants which, in many cases, are out of phase. Besides, they are controlled by machine operators. Our work has consisted in developing a total and supervision automated system to control most of the processes. A first step has been to automate four cereal dryers in order to collect data. Subsequently, a control has been designed to get a constant value of moisture of the grain. At the same time, these data have been used to obtain a total traceability of the process.