Miller Magazine Issue: 135 March 2021

53 COVER STORY MILLER / march 2021 Most of the innovations during the last decade aimed mainly to face the challenges of the flour milling industry, like lowering production costs, improving working condi- tions, complete process automation through application industry 4.0, and controlling product quality. Lowering production costs achieved by introducing high-capacity machines to allow the construction of mills with higher capacity and with the same building volume, and equipment require easy and less maintenance to re- duce the duration of production stoppages. Improving working conditions which enjoy the staff is improved by designing easy-to-adjust and safe, less noisy and user-friendly machine. Complete process automation through application industry 4.0 aims to improve mill management by pro- viding quality and production records using equipment support IoT technology, precise adjustment of machine to assure flour quality consistency, reducing production costs by eliminating worker overtime, and reduce nec- essary labor. To assure accurate and constant mixing of different types of wheat, some companies introduced feeders which work on the principle of loss-in-weight feeding (differential dosing scale), accurately feed each wheat according to controlled recipes and register the total weight, this type of feeder can be used below raw wheat silos and tempering bins. Peeling, debranning equipment have been introduced to increase flour safety by decreasing microbial count, toxin levels, chemical residue in the produced flour, this was achieved by removing great quantity of bran us- ing abrasive elements. Using debranning system in the screen room reduces wheat ash, decreasing tempering time, increase milling section capacity, improve perfor- mance of the mill and flour quality. Satake was the first company which introduced this technology for wheat mills. The latest development of debranning technology was by Omas which introduced Dante system. Most of the innovations were in developing roller mill machine, as examples for recent innovation are, the aero- dynamic design of chamber structure which provides air circulation to keeping roller temperature low, Dynamic Angular Positioning System (DAPS) which developed by Selis Machinery, Antares Plus roller mill which is supplied with sensors measuring the temperature of the rolls and roll bearing introduced by Bühler. In Antares Plus roller mill, wear and tear of roll bearing or lack of grease can be identified by monitoring of bearing temperature. There- by, maintenance stoppage can be minimized and ensures maximum operational safety, particle size measuring sen- sor made automatic adjustment of grinding gap possible. This system minimizes energy consumption, make the system more stable and IoT machine more useful. Nowadays, to assure process control and flour qual- ity near-infrared (NIR) instrument can be used to con- tinuously on-line monitor and record protein, moisture content, ash, color value and count of specks. Thereby, closed-loop control systems can be established to control accurate addition of vital gluten or other additives. Mul- tipoint NIR unit is now available with IoT and is essential for intelligent mills. The latest innovation which helps in mill maintenance management was an instrument that determine the state of roller flutes. Yenar introduced RollCare profile mea- surement device which utilizes laser technology. Bühler offered rollDetect which can measure flutes state of cor- rugated roller and roughness of smooth roller (Ra). The measurement result is a report compering states of the- oretical profile and measured one. Thereby, determine actual wear on rolls, save energy and help in decision of changing rolls. WHAT’S NEXT Most offered innovations were about improving roller mill machine, mill control and automation. No innovation was introduced about the mill diagram after introducing the compact mill diagram. I explained in a previous article that industry 4.0 has to be applied to achieve Artificial Intelligent Mills, which means automation with data min- ing. To actualize intelligent with light-off mill, new mill diagram should be innovated. What if one of the roller mills stopes for any reason? Nowadays all of the mill sec- tion feeds must turn off till that machine work again. We need a new flexible mill diagram which I can explain as “Dynamically Directed Streams”.