Miller Magazine Issue: 142 October 2021

58 COVER STORY MILLER / OCTOber 2021 Introduction The grinding of wheat into flour is mankind’s oldest contin- uously practiced industry and the parent of all modern indus- try; all modern particle breakage operations have wheat mill- ing in their history. This followed by the need for efficient and availability of milling wheat everywhere, so millers developed a practical mastery of several of the fundamental engineering disciplines such as: fluid dynamics and aerodynamics for pow- er generation from water wheels and windmills, mechanical en- gineering for the transmission of power via gearing and control mechanisms and particle handling, breakage and separation operations. The first thoroughgoing plant engineer- Oliver Ev- ans, American designer of the original highly automated flour mills, has been described as the father of milling engineering, while Professor Friedrich Kick author of the first scientific mate- rial written on flour milling in 1871 also furnished comminution science with one of its most beloved laws (1). Securing the grain supply motivated the construction of an- cient empires and triggered the more recent development of national and international transport infrastructures and global trading systems. Meanwhile, the anatomical difference be- tween the structures of the wheat kernel and the rice kernel, that the former features a crease while the latter does not re- quire different approaches to milling that fundamentally altered the respective technological evolution of Western and Eastern civilizations. Through direct consumption and indirectly via animal feed, cereals supply more than half of our global food consumption. Billions of tonnes of cereals are produced annually, Rice is mostly eaten directly by humans, while wheat and maize are also used as animal feed and increasingly as a feedstock for the production of non-food products. Wheat is the most widely grown cereal and the most extensively traded internationally and has had the greatest impact on the history of humans, both in ancient times and nowadays. The milling of cereal kernels, especially wheat kernels, to release their multifunctional poten- tial is an industrial activity that supports all human society. What opportunities and advantages do automation sys- tems offer to flour mills? Automation is defined as a process of automation stream- lines a system by removing human inputs, which decreases errors, increases the speed of delivery, boosts quality, minimiz- es costs, and simplifies the business process. It incorporates software tools, people, and processes to create a complete- ly automated workflow. Rationalization, the fourth principle of Automation provides consistency and minimized variability in flour mills. It is enables continuous monitoring of mills production streams, for different production rates and qualities of grain. The regular flow rates adjusted by machinery and motors speeds, the accurate electronic scales and flow balancers and level sensors can be controlled, monitored and in some cases, corrected upstream automatically during wheat clean- ing, wheat tempering and even milling and packing. Automation and milling Taha Merghani Operation Manager Al Khaleej Grand Mills