Food & Drink Process & Packaging Issue 13 2017 | Page 18

Breakthrough in Process Control and Asset Monitoring in Food Industry Besides inner temperature food measurement during the processes, the SAW sensors can also bring benefits in the F&B plants, as an enabler for precise condition-based maintenance program for the manufacturing assets, especially the rotating machines and electrical assets like transformers or generators, with other models of wireless batteryless temperature sensors (industrial probes, surface How to get even closer to the critical along the production chain, or from control points in your processes? How the oven to the blast chiller, from the to save time, resources and money bratt pan to the freezer... while increasing throughput and food safety? The F&B Industry engineer tool box now includes unique sensors to get easily the temperature at the heart of the food during cooking, and at the heart of the most critical These drawbacks can now be overcome thanks to a revolutionary technology – Surface Acoustic Waves – used in the design of unique wireless batteryless temperature equipment on your production chain. sensors, and integrating into a Chefs can talk about the interest to equip a 10-level professional oven of knowing precisely the core in a restaurant as well as a tunnel/ temperature of the food being cooked, pass-through oven in a food factory or to obtain the best quality and most the rotating racks of a bakery oven. tasty dishes. They often rely on battery-powered probes or wired probes, but know their drawbacks and limits: “cumbersome cables”, “battery management and replacement”, ”not suitable for high or low temperatures”, “uneasy to clean” are listed among others. In the professional kitchen, and even more in the food processing plants, the wired probes also induce a lack of continuity over the whole process, 18 FDPP - www.fdpp.co.uk modular monitoring platform, suitable mounting sensors, plugs etc.). Such continuous surveillance on critical points of the machines not accessible with standard sensors enables preventive maintenance only when required – but before it’s too late – and leads to optimized asset use, reduced life-cycle costs thanks to reduced number of failures and repairs and improved throughputs on the whole production chain. It provides a key, reliable indicator to plant managers that they can act- on, helping them to optimize their processes to deliver perfect products, To help operators cope with HACCP even in changing and challenging processes, the system manages user- environments, and at optimal use of programmable critical control points resources. and alarm thresholds and records data in a centralized system if applicable, or on a local SD-card. SENSeOR provides modular, simple yet comprehensive monitoring solutions combining Surface Acoustic Waves (SAW) A low-cost RFID-reader module can and IoT technologies. The unique wireless also be added, to read out the tag batteryless temperature sensors enable associated to the temperature of a precise continuous control where no food piece on a moving carrier for other sensor fits. instance.