Overview
For a large farming company, Mango built a temperature monitoring and control system for grain silos for product drying. At this particular site were six preservation bins, three ventilation bins, eight seed grain bins and one fast reload bin where loading trucks takes place.
“All in all the project succeeded and we are extremely happy with the Mango hardware, as it is powerful enough to build these kinds of projects on. The whole system has a total of 1771 data points and has been working for years now without any problems.”
Results
The poll duration varies around 550 – 800ms, which is within the required response delay. Modbus network consists of 35 devices with a data point count of approximately 850 points. Communication speed is 57,600 bps.
In addition to the control system which operates the automation devices, the temperature monitoring system, which is built into Mango, communicates with the temperature controllers in the bins. It polls the devices and gathers the data every 20 minutes. The system checks for errors, and calculates the temperatures in the silo bins, and alerts if there are any problems.
Temperatures changes in the bins happen very slowly, so this method of monitoring is very efficient to gain an overview of the current state and information on potential issues with the grain.
The temperature monitoring system also uses meta data source to calculate average and highest temperature in the bins, and high/low/change event detectors to alert users to any problems.
If an alarm state is reached in a bin, an event text message is sent to the right manager or group, so that control decisions can be made quickly to avoid further problems.
As the system was being built, many electrical and communication problems came up, which were not anticipated and because of that Mango hardware, which was installed on site, ended up doing far more work than was initially expected. It handled the additional load with no problems.