Discuss about the Industrial Automation in Food Processing Industry.
Industrial automation is a system that comprises the usage of all the systems that control production or handling of different types of tasks in an industry, including the computers or robots used in the process. Amongst all the industries around the world, the automation system in food industry has comparatively lagged behind in adopting new systems for automation processes (Yu and Maeda 2017). This however, depends on the type of industry that automates a specific kind of system for production and handling purposes. This report would include the industrial automation of Bovine Teat Washing Controller, its implementation and analysis. The report would further comprise of the background of automation in the food processing industry, the reason for automating the Bovine Teat Washing Controller, the tools required, the project design and evaluation process for the industrial automation. With the help of this reporting structure, the automation process and the detailed evaluation of the case study would be effective to implement.
The reason to implement automation in an industrial setup was primarily built on the purpose of increasing production at an exponential level so that cost and time would not be spend on single unit of production. A food processing organization gets involved with numerous consumable products that starts with the raw materials, through processing and goes on with the processes of packaging and shipping (Liu, Sun and Zeng 2014). In older times, food industry would depend on extreme handmade production to make sure the products have been processed in hygienic conditions. Until that time, food industry was considered amongst the lower levels of organizational automation.
However, with the latest developments in technological aspects, food production industries are now been listed as one of the fastest growing segments of automation system. Now, in an average an industry has the capability of producing dairy homogenizer of about 200 tonnes per day, all due to the implementation of automation system in the industry. In the entire system, a complete automation system consists of mixing systems, weighing systems, process pressure controls, process temperature controls, and level controllers, which are all involved in the level of production throughout. An ideal automation system is just not about the bulk amount of production, but about taking care of the raw materials as well (Svennesen et al. 2018). For instance, if a food processing industry focuses mostly on producing bulk amount of milk, it should also take care about the cattle’s milk production and the cattle teats, which acts as the raw material production system. Therefore, implementation of an automation system to take care of the cattle teats increases the quality of raw material produced in a dairy production industry.
Automation is needed in the industry to automate heavy duty industrial procedures that is otherwise a tenuous and time consuming process (Sandgren et al. 2015). Automation benefits and industry in various ways that are listed as below:
Improvement of productivity: Automation allows efficient work flow and reduces labor use. Therefore, productivity is directly proportional to this since the end products created are obtained in bulk. In any industry, a small production with heavy use of machineries, labor and time indicate wastage of money, and this would result in the decline for the industry. Thus, automation is done in an industry to promote heavy productivity and decrease the effective cost in the process.
Improvement in Product Quality: In any given industry, it is just not the production that needs to be taken care of but also the quality of the product needs to be taken care of. Food industry being impeccably competitive demands high quality of production at an even higher rate of production every time. As a matter of fact, this is the aspect of a food production industry that gets the most focus. This could only be done by automated machineries. Therefore, it is necessary that advanced computing technologies be implemented in food production industries to facilitate automated food processing quality evaluation.
Improvement of profitability: From the perspective of management, the implementation of any new industry needs to fulfil the demand of increase in profitability. If the adaptation of an organization to a new technology cannot exchange labour in terms of economic profitability, then the technology should better be discarded (Sarkar 2017). Increase in company economy would naturally benefit into adding to the expansion of the company as well as it would also benefit the other aspects of automation, like improved productivity and product quality as well.
Automation requires many tools to aide into an industry level bulk production. These are listed as follows:
Computer Vision Systems: Computer vision is the science that develops the theoretical and algorithmic basis by which useful information about an object or a scene can be automatically extracted and analysed from an observed image, set or sequence (Black and Kohser 2017). Generally, a machine vision system is used for resulting into the manufacturing process increasing the accuracy, quality and efficiency of the product produced from the industry. The measured parameters are thus used for the collection of feedback in real-time control loop that optimizes the manufacturing process.
Expert Systems: There has been a lot of changes over the years regarding the communication between human and computer interfaces and they have been going through changes faster and faster every passing day (Maier and Hatzack 2017). The evolutions of the biological systems to adapt to these changes has resulted in the increased functionalities of industrial machineries for the human and industrial aide as well. Therefore, expert systems have paved their ways to the functionality of automated industrial systems in the food processing units as well.
The dairy producing industry already had an existing practise of cleaning bovine teats with the help of towels. However, as time advanced and there was a clear indication towards bulk production with reduced time and increased quality, this process started to bite the dust because of its wastefulness of time being a slow process (Torgerson et al. 2015). Even the existing washing systems were being limited in their usage since they had limited control, not intuitive and had to implement high amount of control panels including the problems regarding maintenance of the systems (Groover 2016). There was a need in the industry to adapt to a system that was easy to maintain, encompasses all the issues, has no problem in installation, spontaneous to program, and provides a user with a vast range of optional features. Thus, the Bovine Teat Washer controller was implemented that would increase the quality of the dairy produced from the cattle and would also implement bulk production in minimum amount of time and proper maintenance.
This automation system contains the specifications as listed below in details:
In addition to this, the brushes that are fitted with the automated system meant for the cleansing system are controlled by the password protected system that allows functions like cow cooling and the monitoring for the chemical content in the produced dairy (Barkema et al. 2015). These brushes can further be programmed to run into one amongst any of the three running modes that can again be made to wash and dry simultaneously. Again, there are proper shift timings and modes for stop timers of the brushes to cleanse the desired areas and programmable chemical monitoring of the produced dairy.
The project design and evaluation for the Bovine Teat Washing Controller automated system is as below:
Fig: Project Design (Industrialautomation.us 2018)
Fig: Evaluation of the product (Industrialautomation.us, 2018)
Conclusion
It can thus be concluded that the automated system in food industry is essential and as an automated system the Bovine Teat Washing Controller had added to the industry benefits since the time of its inception. Implementation of automated or computerised industrial machineries are meant for increasing the productivity, product quality and profitability of industry based products and this machine adds to the same. It helps in providing good quality milk with restricted amount of chemical content and keeps the production high while keeping the cattle cool by time to time functioning as well. The tools that are required for an automation process like the computer vision systems, the networking sensors and other expert systems add to the betterment of the industry and the automated industrial tool in discussion adds to the same. Therefore, it can clearly be said that the Bovine Teat Washing Controller has added to the industry as an automated system from all the aspects that a computerised automated system can benefit an industry.
References
Barkema, H.W., Von Keyserlingk, M.A.G., Kastelic, J.P., Lam, T.J.G.M., Luby, C., Roy, J.P., LeBlanc, S.J., Keefe, G.P. and Kelton, D.F., 2015. Invited review: Changes in the dairy industry affecting dairy cattle health and welfare. Journal of dairy science, 98(11), pp.7426-7445.
Black, J.T. and Kohser, R.A., 2017. DeGarmo’s materials and processes in manufacturing. John Wiley & Sons.
Groover, M.P., 2016. Automation, production systems, and computer-integrated manufacturing. Pearson Education India.
Industrialautomation.us. (2018). [online] Available at: https://www.industrialautomation.us/images/case-studies/bovine2.jpg [Accessed 10 Apr. 2018].
Industrialautomation.us. (2018). [online] Available at: https://www.industrialautomation.us/images/case-studies/bovine3.gif [Accessed 10 Apr. 2018].
Liu, D., Sun, D.W. and Zeng, X.A., 2014. Recent advances in wavelength selection techniques for hyperspectral image processing in the food industry. Food and Bioprocess Technology, 7(2), pp.307-323.
Maier, J. and Hatzack, W., 2017. Automatic cleaning system and method for cleaning/treating teats of a dairy animal. U.S. Patent 9,795,111.
Sandgren, C.H., Oostra, H., Chapman, J. and Älveby, N., 2015. Maintenance of and trouble shooting on milk quality in automatic milking systems. In Proceedings of Conference: National Mastitis Council, 54th Annual Meeting.
Sarkar, N.R., 2017. Machine vision for quality control in the food industry. In Instrumental methods for quality assurance in foods (pp. 177-198). Routledge.
Svennesen, L., Mahmmod, Y., Pedersen, K., Krömker, V. and Klaas, I.C., 2018. Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus agalactiae in Milk and Teat Skin from Cows in Automatic Milking Systems. In National Mastitis Council Annual Meeting.
Torgerson, K.L., Hedlund, N. and Stuessel, M.J., GEA Farm Technologies Inc, 2015. Automatic dairy animal milker unit backflusher and teat dip applicator system and method. U.S. Patent 9,072,273.
Yu, G.M. and Maeda, T., 2017. Inline progesterone monitoring in the dairy industry. Trends in biotechnology, 35(7), pp.579-582.
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