Performance assessment of a multi-energy system for a food industry

The energy saving is becoming an important topic also in the food industry. For this reason, it is important to use multi-energy systems to produce hot water for processes and space heating. The application considered in this paper, which concerns a chocolate factory, focuses on the hot water production through a multi-source storage tank. The water inside the tank is heated by four solar panels when there is enough solar radiation and by a gas back-up boiler. The cold aqueduct water, which it is going to be heated in the accumulator, is first preheated recovering waste heat from the condenser of the chiller. The system was equipped with an energy monitoring and recording device. The thermal model was used to analyse the hot water production system during the summer season considering the options of the heat recovery and of the solar thermal exploitation. The performance analysis was developed in order to establish energy savings that may be achieved

Performance assessment of a multi-energy system for a food industry

The energy saving is becoming an important topic also in the food industry. For this reason, it is important to use multi-energy systems to produce hot water for processes and space heating. The application considered in this paper, which concerns a chocolate factory, focuses on the hot water production through a multi-source storage tank. The water inside the tank is heated by four solar panels when there is enough solar radiation and by a gas back-up boiler. The cold aqueduct water, which it is going to be heated in the accumulator, is first preheated recovering waste heat from the condenser of the chiller. The system was equipped with an energy monitoring and recording device. The thermal model was used to analyse the hot water production system during the summer season considering the options of the heat recovery and of the solar thermal exploitation. The performance analysis was developed in order to establish energy savings that may be achieved

Case studies in food freezing at very low temperature

Freezing is one of the most widely used and effective processes to preserve foods shelf-life during long periods of time. This paper focuses on very low temperature freezing, and a thermal model, based on literature formulations, was developed to calculate the food freezing time considering several kinds of food, with different sizes, shapes and chemical composition. Moreover, once evaluated the food freezing time as a function of temperature and velocity of the cooling fluid, a chart reporting the food production rate, the freezing time and the cooling capacity was developed to properly design the freezing equipment in terms of optimal choice of the process and type of freezer

Cost-effective visual odometry system for vehicle motion control in agricultural environments

In precision agriculture, innovative cost-effective technologies and new improved solutions, aimed at making operations and processes more reliable, robust and economically viable, are still needed. In this context, robotics and automation play a crucial role, with particular reference to unmanned vehicles for crop monitoring and site-specific operations. However, unstructured and irregular working environments, such as agricultural scenarios, require specific solutions regarding positioning and motion control of autonomous vehicles. In this paper, a reliable and cost-effective monocular visual odometry system, properly calibrated for the localisation and navigation of tracked vehicles on agricultural terrains, is presented. The main contribution of this work is the design and implementation of an enhanced image processing algorithm, based on the cross-correlation approach. It was specifically developed to use a simplified hardware and a low complexity mechanical system, without compromising performance. By providing sub-pixel results, the presented algorithm allows to exploit low-resolution images, thus obtaining high accuracy in motion estimation with short computing time. The results, in terms of odometry accuracy and processing time, achieved during the in-field experimentation campaign on several terrains proved the effectiveness of the proposed method and its fitness for automatic control solutions in precision agriculture applications