National Instruments Helps Carlsberg Produce High Quality Beer

Author(s):
Carlo Mussi - Via Cappuccina 40

Industry:
Food/Beverage

Products:
LabVIEW

The Challenge:
Remotely controlling Carlsberg beer fermentation cellar system.

The Solution:
Using BridgeVIEW to set up a central supervisory position for the electronic documentation of work processes.

Introduction
In a Carlsberg brewery in Italy, we need to centralize control of the fermentation cellar. With BridgeVIEW it was not only possible, but also simple to connect to the existing network of programmable controllers. Now, plant operators can not only collect, archive, and process technical data but also manage, directly from the control room, the proper execution of all the product handling operations.

Overview
The Carlsberg fermentation plant is divided into three main sections:

• A cellar with a fermentation tank
• A cellar with tanks for the selection and maintenance of the yeast culture
• A station for the preparation of the cleaning solutions to clean the piping and the tanks
  

Each of the three sections of the system is controlled by a PLC and the three PLCs are interconnected with local communications network. Operators communicate with the system using the control consoles located near the systems themselves.

Because of the extremely widespread layout of the installation, we created a monitoring position located in a control booth where we centralized the control positions of other brewery systems. We equipped the control system with monitoring capabilities that can repeat the information that is displayed on a control console in a remote location.

The objective of the operation was to:

• Make remote surveillance of the system possible
• Immediately recognize any irregularities for rapid intervention
• Measure the temporal movement of the technical process parameters and store them in the historical archive
  

Developing the System
With BridgeVIEW running on Windows NT, we quickly access the graphical interface - the cardinal point of the application. We needed two distinct channels of communication for the installation. The first channel provides data reception from the field network that links the three programmable logic controllers (PLCs); the second channel connects a series of heat regulators that manage the cooling process in the fermentation tanks.
For each fermenting tank, the operator views the state of activity of all the valves as well as the temperatures that the various probes are measuring. The position of the fields beside the tank symbol indicates the physical location of the sensor.

A process log journals the various details of the different operations and when they took place. Should any irregular situation take place, the process log provides useful information to reconstruct the situation and helps in preventive maintenance. In the process log, the operator views the last recorded states or can access the most remote events by running through the contents of the log using a positioning cursor.

The composition of the cleaning solutions is also extremely important in order to ensure the sanitizing process is properly executed. We continually monitor the value of these parameters, and we can query the data that is collected. Because of the supervisory station, we can completely document all executed operations.

Conclusion
BridgeVIEW has proven to be very versatile and simple to understand and use. Today, with BridgeVIEW supervisory system, the operators manage the fermentation cellar system more precisely, in a more timely fashion, with better control of the process.

For more information, contact:

Carlo Mussi

President

NTA s.r.l.,Via Cappuccina 40

20035 LISSONE (MI), Italy

Tel: (039) 2456583

E-mail: ntacm@tin.it

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