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Automation Basics: Wireless Pressure Tracking Propels Brewer’s Success

Badger Hill group photo, Michael Koppelman is at bottom rightIt’s always interesting to see what sessions at EMRex prove to be the biggest draws. Naturally any session discussing brewing will be assured an audience, but the presentation by Michael Kooppelman in 2017 was standing-room only, even without free samples. He’s not your average process engineer, in fact he’s not an engineer at all, at least not by formal training, but he had the room in rapt attention. In the Badger Hill photo to the left, Michael Koppelman is at bottom right.

 

For those who missed his presentations, he did create an article covering the same material, which ran in the Jan/Feb 2018 issue of InTech, titled Wireless Pressure Tracking Propels Brewer’s Success. But let’s fill in a little of the back story of how all this happened.

 

Koppelman works for Badger Hill Brewing in Shakopee, MN. The brewery is not far from Emerson’s office, and a few of our folks took an interest in the operation, naturally strictly from a process perspective. Like most craft breweries, it is primarily a manual process and focuses on the craft nature of brewing, retaining the human element.

 

At Badger Hill, we enjoy craft brewing because we manufacture fun, making a product that is not a commodity. Our customers want us to be craftspeople—innovative and different—which is exactly what we want to be as a company. But, craft brewers are also manufacturers. We know we need to deliver product reliably enough to be financially sustainable, which means dealing with many of the same problems as more traditional manufacturers. Customers expect consistency, and operations must comply with appropriate regulations. We need to learn from other companies, so we can focus on new problems rather than ones already solved.

 

Badger Hill’s equipment is pretty basic with minimal instrumentation and virtually no automation. So, what might be possible if a creative person is given some very basic tools, such as a Rosemount 3051 wireless pressure transmitter? The results were nothing short of astonishing. Koppelman took to it like a duck to water. But remember, he’s not a process engineer. His background is in astrophysics and music, but he has an obvious knack for understanding many technologies. He even taught himself how to use Modbus.

 

Like many craft brewers, ours is largely a manual operation with basic programmable logic controllers driving motors, valves, and pumps-and only a modest amount of instrumentation. When we installed the first wireless pressure transmitter, our initial step was to figure out the best way to extract data and post it to the cloud for analysis and archiving. This meant getting to know Modbus, an amazingly forward-thinking protocol given its age, which was not familiar to us. Two wires provide remote data access and automation for dozens of devices.

 

That’s only the beginning, as the brewery came up with an elegantly simple mechanism for capturing and historizing the data from the 3051.

 

The data is requested by a simple Modbus master hosted on a $20 Arduino-like chip called a Particle Photon. It reads the response and posts it to a cloud-based database using a RESTful interface over HTTP. For data analytics, we have pretty graphs on the Internet, and we can download the data for analysis. In the future, we would like to tap into the big data capabilities of companies like Google or Amazon.

 

If that isn’t impressive enough, the brewery was able to use the pressure data to capture a whole bunch of information about the process, and this is where listeners got really interested. From a simple pressure curve combined with very basic data collection tools, the brewers were effectively able to characterize the whole brewing process. This is what really amazed the listeners.

 

These profiles document each step and put the process in a form suitable for comparing it to similar batches. This provides 90 percent of the information we were recording manually, and provides it in greater detail. When we lay profiles from multiple brewing days on top of each other, we can see a high degree of consistency with these manual processes. This suggests we have a good recipe, and our brewers know what they are doing. It also shows us that the process does not need to be adjusted on the fly, which gives us a basis for plans to automate the process. This allows us to build our craft brewers' know-how into our automation.

 

Koppelman goes into much more detail on how Badger Hill developed the methodology and what they’re getting from it, so the article is well worth a very careful read. His ultimate point is that it is possible to infer a lot about what’s happening in a process from some very basic instrumentation if you’re willing to think about what it’s telling you. A valuable lesson in any industry.

 

You can find more information like this, and meet with other people looking at the same kinds of situations in the Emerson Exchange365 community. It’s a place where you can communicate and exchange information with experts and peers in all sorts of industries around the world. Look for the Pressure Group and other specialty areas for suggestions and answers.