rookies first attempt at automation

[EricT]

Looks good. Were you able to program multiple hop additions?

 

[Wolfhausen83]

That thing is amazing, cant wait to see the updated version

 

[clay9_24]

We had three "hop droppers" that were basically pvc tubes that would be pre loaded with the hops to be used in a pretty standard hop schedule. The recipe entry on the hmi would handle all of the hops scheduling.
The system was pretty much plug and chug. Enter your recipe and then wait while it does it's business. Though if it was not a college project and we had more time to perfect it the calculations it would have been much smoother for negative effects like; line loss, flow rates, heat loss to the environment, etc which would have made some aspects run much smoother.

 

[clay9_24]

The commercial breweries use high pressure (100 Psi) to get needed temperature delta and energy transfer for heating, this is not what I would suggest for folks without steam experience to try and build a steam heated system.
Having designed and built flash boiler powered water and wort heating brew systems, the safety and control requirements are quite a bit more complicated than direct firing would be. Direct fired gas heating would be the easiest and safest method to implement for this sized brew system, no chance for a pressurized steam mishap.

clearly from what i have read from HBT you are the go to source for steam additions. Using steam seems simple, just thermodynamics 1 all over again, but as far as piecing a system together to heat X volume of wort Y degrees i have yet to do any calculations.

The clear lesson from the big brew systems that I have done is that you need to apply a massive amount of heat as efficiently as possible. My current 50 gal brew pot takes over an hour to reach boil with a 30 lb regulator on a 180k btu burner.

questions questions and more questions. is there ever a pole on the root locus graph of the brewery learning curve?

 

[kladue]

At the scale my systems were designed, a 40' and 80' tube flash boiler works for water heating and steam injection for step mashing. Last test session with 80' boiler calcs out to roughly 8.8 KW heat input to wort as steam, and 13.2KW in water heating mode. I chose to go with direct fire for the boil kettle for ease in control and concurrent boil kettle heating while using the boiler for sparge water heating. The gas side flow control is handled by STEC 4500 mass flow controllers, and the water side flow is controlled by belimo proportional ball valves. With inlet and outlet temperatures and flow measurements it is easy to do the energy applied calculations and log the results. The control complexity and amount of c# code needed to deal with the boiler operation make it a challenging method for automated control. If you had to buy the needed ignition, gas, temperature, and water control components for just the boiler, new it would run about $1,800+, without the PLC analog input/output modules needed.

 

[kladue]

How set on steam heat are you, I have been considering a much lower cost heating method that would use a jet burner to heat air around boil kettle with similar performance to steam. Variable gas flow control could be with a current to pressure transducer fed with air that actuates a springless pressure regulator controlling high pressure propane feed to the jet burner. This would be a copy of the direct fired self contained commercial cooking kettles in use.
A second approach would be an under mounted boiler with jet burner in a tube similar in design to a RV water heater, this would be a method of steam generation for a larger size kettle with gravity condensate return, and if the controls and safety valves are correctly sized it should be reasonably safe. This approach is a copy of the direct fired commercial steam kettles for kitchens, and on/off control could be used to cycle burner as thermal mass would smooth out variations if enough water is used. This has the advantage of no water/ condensate handling issues and simple pressure limit switches for safety shut off. The caveat on the steam approach will be the strength at operating temperature of the boil kettle, plan for a factor of 5 for safety reasons and an operating pressure of less than 15 PSI. Test the kettle with water to see if it has signs of distress under local city water pressure, if not then steam should be a viable option.
Look at the Groen line of commercial kettles for design ideas, here is a link http://www.groenkettle.com/industrial_kettles_direct_steam.html and http://www.groenkettle.com/commercial_kettles_self_contained.html

 

[InfernoBrews]

SFW (Sh** FU** WOW) Rookie OK?