Desenvolvimento do protótipo: cervejaria artesanal móvel automatizada - CAMA

Abstract

Beer is a drink consumed worldwide, based on a combination of grains that generate a sugary must which, in turn, undergoes fermentation, prepared in the final drink. There are variations in the method of production, which gives rise to different types of beer. However, in general, the legislation in Brazil defines that: “Beer is the beverage resulting from fermentation, from brewer's yeast, malted barley must or malt extract...”. In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of micro breweries in Brazil, giving rise to the opportunity to associate the process process, characteristic of engineering courses, with cheaper solutions for the electronic control system of the industrial plant. Given the above, the objective of this work is to present a prototype that combines the production process of a mini brewery with low-cost and returned technologies, thus seeking automation and control of the brewery, being capable of replication in micro craft breweries. The hardware was developed using a small single board computer the Raspberry Pi, a commercially available mechanical relay module, a handcrafted solid state relay driver and other accessories such as valves and pumps. The programming was developed on a stream-based platform, Node-RED, created by IBM, based on JavaScript. Among the functionalities of the prototype called automated mobile craft brewery (AMCB), it includes automatic opening and closing of valves, automatic activation of electrical resistances and automatic activation of electric pumps. In this way, the processes of heating and pumping fluids between the different tanks through which the brewer's must passes can take place in a well-controlled and automated way, contributing to the quality of the drink and to the optimization of production, even in small breweries. The control center and the developed software met their goals, performing a temperature ramp in the heating part of the process together with a recirculation and maintaining a fermentation temperature in the refrigeration part.