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Collaborative project: intelligent flexible control for consistent digitalisation during coffee roasting – subproject B (Roesten_intelligent)
Project
Project code: 281A510B19
Contract period: 15.02.2021
- 14.02.2024
Budget: 43,315 Euro
Purpose of research: Applied research
Keywords: food processing, digital world, process quality, product quality, food quality
Since coffee is a very delicate natural product, the roasting process still requires a lot of manual intervention by the roasting master, despite the use of machines with automatic control, in order to compensate both for natural product variations (material properties of the coffee variety, initial moisture content of the green coffee) as well as the external boundary conditions during roasting (size of the batch to be roasted, outside temperature, air humidity) in such a way that the product is roasted according to a specified temperature curve (roasting temperature profile) and thus meets the customer's taste expectations. A further complicating factor is that during roasting, the coffee beans undergo significant changes in their physical properties, e.g. through evaporation of water vapour, roasting reactions with heat generation, a strong increase in porosity and volume as well as weight loss, which has a considerable influence on the process. These manual interventions make a continuous digitalisation of the production in terms of Industry 4.0 impossible so far. Therefore, in this project an intelligent, flexible and adaptive control system for coffee roasting machines is to be developed, which is able to guarantee a roasting process of constant quality in spite of fluctuations of the product and external parameters and in spite of the high process complexity. Such a control system will then enable Probat's customers to digitalise their coffee production throughout, in which buyers can specify a roasting temperature profile for a single batch of several kilograms of coffee via the Internet and this is then implemented automatically in production. The scientific challenge is that the process dynamics change significantly over time due to the changes in the coffee beans, which is why an existing procedure (Model Predictive Control) must be significantly extended for control.
Section overview
Subjects
- Food Processing
