Crane's Never ending Brewery Upgrades

[crane]

The valve looks like one of these:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32868181267.html

They LOOK heavy but might not be that bad.

I bought mine off of eBay. $145 including shipping. They have stock in the US so I didn't get hit with the Corona/dosXX/Modelo virus crap. The rest of my orders this year are just starting to ship from China.

It weighs 8.5 lbs, but my silver soldered TC ferrule is holding up to the weight so far...

 

[RichardU]

I love that image. How did you make it?

Also, do you mind revealing your source in China for stainless?

Cheers, Richard

 

[crane]

I love that image. How did you make it?

Also, do you mind revealing your source in China for stainless?

Cheers, Richard

Microsoft paint 3D.

So many things were bought from different vendors off of AliExpress and Ebay

 

[crane]

We're not supposed to leave our homes, but I can still order stuff off of amazon.

 

[crane]

I ran out of analog inputs and room for more stuff in my control panel. I plan on building a new control panel at some point, but that's going to wait until a few other things are taken care of first. In the meantime, I had almost everything I needed to throw together a second make-shift control panel. I spent $30 for the box, $2 for the AC outlets, and another $51 for the analog output board.

3 switched 120V outlets
4 Proportional valve outputs
6 4-20mA Analog inputs
6 12V ball/solenoid valve outputs
1 24V output for TC butterfly valve

And then I made up some cables to go along with it.

 

[swimIan]

We're not supposed to leave our homes, but I can still order stuff off of amazon.

View attachment 672062

What did you decide about ordering?
I’m wondering about ordering from AliExpress?

 

[JoeyChestnutFan]

I ran out of analog inputs and room for more stuff in my control panel. I plan on building a new control panel at some point, but that's going to wait until a few other things are taken care of first. In the meantime, I had almost everything I needed to throw together a second make-shift control panel. I spent $30 for the box, $2 for the AC outlets, and another $51 for the analog output board.

3 switched 120V outlets
4 Proportional valve outputs
6 4-20mA Analog inputs
6 12V ball/solenoid valve outputs
1 24V output for TC butterfly valve

View attachment 672239

View attachment 672242

And then I made up some cables to go along with it.

View attachment 672238

What cable is that?

 

[RiverCityBrewer]

If you are talking about the bundle of blue cabling, search for "cable sleeve" and you will find a lot of options.

 

[crane]

What cable is that?

They are made up with cable sleeving as pointed out above. Even makes an ugly gray Ethernet cable look sexy.

I also use marine grade heat shrink with glue inside of it to create a waterproof connection after soldering. Works great as the glue melts and gets pushed in between the wires as the heat shrink contracts.

 

[crane]

What did you decide about ordering?
I’m wondering about ordering from AliExpress?

Lights for the brew stand, miscellaneous stainless steel fittings, and toilet paper. Seriously though, I came back from Mexico 2 weeks ago to find that we are in a pooper paper crisis!

As far as AlieExpress goes, all but one of the items I ordered before lunar new year has arrived. Some of the items I have ordered in the last couple of weeks have already arrived. Every else has "shipped".

 

[crane]

I bought several of these IFM SM6004 flow/temp sensors off of ebay for $40 a piece last year. Only problem is that the BSP adapters that you need pretty much double the cost of these. However, I have fought enough "npt" threads on cheap stainless from china that I decided to use a crap ton of teflon tape with some pipe dope and we can get a good seal with a BPT TC adapter. Sure enough they hold up to my garden hose water pressure for a leak test.

 

[crane]

I have also force myself to plant my ass at the desk most of today to work on updating/revising the brew space background image. Now I need to re-layout all the device elements over the new background image.

 

[crane]

I am having a hard time deciding on a background color.

Blue

Gray

Green

 

[BrunDog]

I bought several of these IFM SM6004 flow/temp sensors off of ebay for $40 a piece last year. Only problem is that the BSP adapters that you need pretty much double the cost of these. However, I have fought enough "npt" threads on cheap stainless from china that I decided to use a crap ton of teflon tape with some pipe dope and we can get a good seal with a BPT TC adapter. Sure enough they hold up to my garden hose water pressure for a leak test.

View attachment 673221

I looked at this sensor a lot... it is a really nice unit. Ultimately didn't go this route because it can't get a sufficient pulse rate to generate a reasonable resolution at ~1 lpm rate.

BTW I kinda like the green background best... not usually a green guy but I think its a good contrast. Nice work!!

 

[crane]

I looked at this sensor a lot... it is a really nice unit. Ultimately didn't go this route because it can't get a sufficient pulse rate to generate a reasonable resolution at ~1 lpm rate.

BTW I kinda like the green background best... not usually a green guy but I think its a good contrast. Nice work!!

Not sure what you mean about pulse rate, these are 4-20mA outputs. The measuring range shows 0.1 lpm for the minimum on:

https://www.ifm.com/us/en/product/SM6004

 

[crane]

Well this is what I came up with after a lot of tweaking. Time for bed.

 

[BrunDog]

Not sure what you mean about pulse rate, these are 4-20mA outputs. The measuring range shows 0.1 lpm for the minimum on:

https://www.ifm.com/us/en/product/SM6004

View attachment 673269

Sorry, jumped to inferences... Similar model, such as the 6601 model has digital outputs.

 

[swimIan]

I bought several of these IFM SM6004 flow/temp sensors off of ebay for $40 a piece last year. Only problem is that the BSP adapters that you need pretty much double the cost of these. However, I have fought enough "npt" threads on cheap stainless from china that I decided to use a crap ton of teflon tape with some pipe dope and we can get a good seal with a BPT TC adapter. Sure enough they hold up to my garden hose water pressure for a leak test.

View attachment 673221

Based their specs I have wondered about their ability to handle close to boiling temps. This has held me back from getting them myself. I suppose that a short time at a high temp will not break them all at once?

 

[BrunDog]

Would you be looking to measure near boiling temp liquid, or it’s just that the sensor needs to be in the loop which will at some point(s) have NBTL?

 

[swimIan]

Would you be looking to measure near boiling temp liquid, or it’s just that the sensor needs to be in the loop which will at some point(s) have NBTL?

Yes, the latter. I have one of those cheap plastic ones in the loop right now.

 

[crane]

There are several different reasons why the upper or lower limits of a sensor are determined by the manufacturer. A lot of the time its not because the sensor will be destroyed and stop working. There is usually some sort of margin factor built in as well. With all that being said, there is a possibility that they will degrade over time from extended exposure above they max rating. I guess I will find out if that is the case down the road.

I did some testing before with these flow meters above their rated temp. However, I did some more testing with them yesterday to see where they max out at. In my system these will see a max of 170-180F. These sensors work up to 211.5 before going into "Over Load". However, they start to drift above 175F by about +/-2F up to about 185F. Above that the drift increased. The parts of the brewing process where I will be measuring temps above 175F are not super critical to have a precise temperature, so I can compensate for this drift.

You can adjust the output scaling for these, but the max (20mA) output is 176F. No worries, the sensor continues to output above 20mA. I measured 5.36V across a 250.4 Ohm resistor, so Ohm's law tells me that its outputting 21.4mA as its max at 211.5F. So if I use a 233 Ohm or lower resistor value I will not exceed the ADC input of the Mega. Time to place a Digikey order. I needed a few other things from there as well.

Setup measuring the voltage across a 250 Ohm resistor. Resistor is placed between the output of the sensor to GND to convert the 4-20mA output to 1-5V.

Max output temp and voltage.

Sensor goes into "Over Load" when it measures 212F or above. It wasn't actually boiling inside there.

 

[BrunDog]

Nice work. Drives me nuts when analog limits aren't maintained. 4-20 should mean 4-20... otherwise show the scale(s) only. Sounds like you have the path.

 

[Gruel]

Amazing! You must really like process control. Have you thought about selling your services to full size breweries?

And an attempt to make this a not completely useless comment: I have seen good results epoxying permanent threaded connections instead of using PTFE tape.

 

[crane]

Amazing! You must really like process control. Have you thought about selling your services to full size breweries?

And an attempt to make this a not completely useless comment: I have seen good results epoxying permanent threaded connections instead of using PTFE tape.

It's not so much just process control, but automation in general. I've implemented some sort of automation at all my "career" jobs. Most of it has been for testing of electronics/computers. Most recently I am working on automating our circuit board design flow.

Also, thanks for the epoxy suggestion. That is a good middle ground between PTFE and silver soldering.

 

[crane]

More quarantine funtimes today. Got my 232 Ohm resistors from Digikey yesterday. Took 2 days longer than normal, so not bad considering. I snuck out to the garage in between work meetings today and soldered in the new resistors to the mega screw terminal board.

I wanted to have a way to validate the temperature output from the IFM sensor with the new 232 Ohm resistor, so I slapped this together. It has a thermistor in it, and I can connect it to my "Aux Temp" input on my control panel. I can now insert this temp probe any place in my plumbing where a 90 degree elbow is to measure loop temperature.

In this case, I put it right after the IFM sensor.

And after some minor fine tuning we are pretty much spot on. IFM sensor and thermistor are within 0.1F of each other. IFM BruControl Element matches IFM display. Let's drink a beer to that.

Might as well try it here as well.

 

[BrunDog]

Gotta like it when a plan comes together!

 

[crane]

Worked on getting the Hops Boss fully integrated into the brew process yesterday. This was not completely straight forward as one would hope. I needed to parse all the hop additions, combine some, split some into multiple drops, and ignore others like dry hop additions. I also need to differentiate from boil and whirlpool additions. If my recipe calls to add 1oz each of 4 different hops at 20 min in the boil, this will show up as 4 separate line items in the recipe, but needs to be combined into a single motor shell drop. Additionally, when I do 10 gallon batches I will have times where I drop more than 8oz (motor shell capacity) at a time. Here 1 or more line items on the recipe needs to turn into multiple motor shell drops. Unfortunately, BruControl doesn't support arrays, array indexing, or looping structures. You could accomplish this in BruControl, but it would be ugly to code, and would take a lot more lines of code than doing it in javascript.

I already use node-red to read in my Beersmith recipe and upload that to BruControl. Since the parsing of this information has to happen when the recipe is read in, it was pretty straight forward to add some more code in node-red to accomplish this. Below is the main section of code that iterates through all of the individual hop additions and translates that into the required motor shell drop times and types (boil vs whirlpool). Additionally, I parse the whirlpool hop additions, to set the whirlpool rest time. As you can see I have while loops buried inside of if statements inside of a for loop.

 

[BrunDog]

Very nice!!

 

[AkTom]

You guys kill me! With your automatic stuff. I love it, but I have a hard time understanding gravity!!!

 

[crane]

The second major revision of the plumbing is getting wrapped up. Here are the changes:

1. swapped out my paddle wheel flow meters with the IFMs.
2. added some valves to drain the MT and BK during CIP.
3. added the Hops Boss
4. added a path in the BK re-circulation loop to bypass the chiller.
5. swapped out my DC pumps for AC pumps and added proportional valves for control flow.

I was not happy with the performance and control-ability of DC pumps. For example, when I am sparging the wort from the MT flows into the bottom of my BK, not the re-circulation return port. At the beginning of sparging the height difference between the MT and BK results in too high of a flow rate with the pump turned off. So I needed something else to restrict the flow rate.

Additionally, I found that the DC pumps had minimum duty cycle limits for the PWM outputs. However, the duty cycle necessary to get the pump spinning again is quite a bit higher. Without restricting the output of the valve, the resulting minimum flow rates were higher than I wanted.

From the testing I have done so far, these issues have been addressed with the AC pumps and proportional valves. The deadband flow control scripts I have, are working very well at quickly responding to target flow changes, as well as accurately maintaining the target flow once its there.

Finally, I thought it was inconsequential to leave a gap in the boards on the brew stand. There are over a dozen TC gaskets chilling under there now, and will stay there until I move this beast.