Grain Dryer Intake
Grain Dryers. You tip 40 tonnes of grain in one end, and the dryer spits it out into a huge pile at the other end, all dry and toasty and ready to be ground into bread. Or whatever.
That’s the ideal situation. My client had a problem - the conveyor belts were turned on and off with a series of buttons, and despite them being labelled 1 through 6, the delivery drivers invariably forgot one, or something snagged and a belt stopped. Now imagine 40 tonnes of grain being dumped inside the footings of the building - where it’s too tight to get a tractor and bucket in….
Solution! A small PLC that turns the conveyor belts on and off in the correct sequence, so they are all running, and when they stop, they are all empty. So the start up weight isn’t overloaded.
Add in the bonus of an emergency stop that stops everything, a remote start/stop from the loading bay and the weighbridge, and sensors on the overflow flaps and motor controllers that stops everything in the event a belt jams or a motor overloads.
The innards of the grain silos - not the best place to get tonnes of grain dumped into.
A series of numbers and arrows showed the desired start sequence.
Re-used an old control panel to save costs.
And all the existing buttons and lights still work as backup systems.
The PLC on the test bench
The client commented after the system had been running for a while that he was saving 4000 steps a day on his Fitbit, because he no longer had to run back and forth from the farmhouse or weighbridge to the intake hopper.