Reduction of Energy Consumption in Brewing Hop Drying Using Smart Manufacturing
Project Lead: Oregon State University
Partners: Ectron Corporation
Member % Cost Share: 50%
CESMII % Cost Share: 50%
Duration: 6 Months
Problem Statement
Hop drying is a significant consumer of energy and a production bottleneck ins the ~$640 million/year hop growing industry. Dynamic drying protocols can increase product quality, save energy, and improve throughput, but require implementation of smart manufacturing principles
Project Goal
Identify the energy saving potential of dynamic drying protocols driven by real time process parameter measurements, that also maintain product quality.
Technical Approach
- Develop and use process models of typical kilns to identify drying protocols that can reduce energy consumption and increase productivity
- Instrument manufacturing process and measure energy consumption for baseline and proposed kilning process at different grower sites
- Quantify energy and economic savings for growers and publish recommendations
Deliverables/Outcomes/SM Marketplace
- Delivered complete data sets for instrumented kiln baseline and experimental drying protocols. Data included machine learning model training data.
- Predictive models for agricultural produce drying
- Agricultural batch drying reusable SM profile
Potential Impact
- Increase in Energy Efficiency
- Increase in Production Efficiency
- Broad Agricultural Sector Impact
Benefits
- SM profile of generic agricultural product drying
- Ectron SmartEYE allow easy data transfer to SIMP
- Baseline data will enable edge and cloud app for future SIMP and SM Marketplace deployment
- Potential for new CESMII membership in agricultural, food and beverage vertical
