The Automatic Dampening System NC8 – modernization of a most successful product
The dampening plays a major role within the grain preparation and cleaning section of a flour mill. It exerts a big influence on the grinding process, since it particularly supports the separation of endosperm and husk. Furthermore the flour humidity is affected and an even and smooth grinding is accomplished. The better the constancy of the input moisture at first break, the less interferences are occurring within milling processes. Whereas in former times a manual water addition was often used, today a continuous moisture measurement with automatic water regulation is installed in most plants. This ensures that in spite of fluctuating initial moisture values, final moisture of the dampened grain remains on constant level.
The company FRIEDRICH electronic, Germany dedicates itself to the development and production of Automatic Dampening Systems for the last decades. In this duration several device generations were being run through. Recently FRIEDRICH electronic came out with a new generation, which replaces series NC6 by the new series NC8. In the following improvements of the new system are described.
Central point of the new generation is the upgraded evaluation electronic. It provides the classical function set to measure, display and justify the moisture content. It orients itself at the familiar design of the predecessor, but additionally comes with colour-touch-display and intuitive and easy-to-use operation menu. Unexperienced users easily navigate through the device functions. For the calibration of the measuring values the device features an additional wizard, which leads users in individual dialogs through the procedure. In this manner misadjustments can be avoided easily.
Further feature of the evaluation is the pre-damp-function with dry and constant water flow (timer-based). An alarm memory records initial appearance and rectification time of errors. With the aid of a regulation diagram the controller performance can be identified and optimized. In future, on the application and complex adjustment of a capacitive grain sensor will be forgone, instead water clearance is triggered by a plausibility check of measuring values and can be blocked or cleared by an extern signal – if required.
The evaluation electronic comes with all established interfaces and can easily be integrated in automated milling electronics. The device also provides a capable data storage module, which saves measuring data on a pluggable SD card as CSV file. The data can be imported in Excel or accessed via well-arranged graphic diagram within the evaluation menu. User may check performance progression at any time, retrospectively to past night, past week or one year ago.
By means of the integrated Ethernet interface with web server, the display may be mirrored to the browser surface of a PC or mobile device. Thereby miller has access to process data at any time. Furthermore it is possible to maintain the system remotely.
As a result of the multiple interfaces the evaluation electronic is compatible to all predecessor series and can be connected to prior type measuring pipes and water dosing units. Hereby existing systems can be modernized module by module.
The new measuring pipe provides an improved weighing system, which was optimized in relation to low wearout and independence of individual bulk properties. Hectoliter-weight is now measured with an enlarged measuring volume and an improved feed channel. The water dosing unit is equipped with a high-precision magnetic-inductive water counter (no moveable parts) with live display. Besides the automatic proportional valve there is a needle valve for manual water dosage in case of maintenance intervals.
Not least because of improvement of several other details, the Automatic Dampening System NC8 puts the grain dampening process on a new quality level.