I'm not an engineer, so don't know if I belong here, or not. We're planning a new facility and need to incorporate heat sensing, temperature monitoring and control system for drying of our input resource materials and for heat conditioning of the product materials. This will be integrated with direct and indirect solar heating systems, supplemented as need with conventional radiant heating. Any guidance for us? suggestions? consultants?
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The discussion PLC or microcontroller is also based on another criteria: If you use a microcontroller solution that is built by a one man company and the guy has all the know how, you have a unique solution and you will depend on the guy for the complete future life of the system. If the guy walks out you may have a big problem for the maintenance. If you use a PLC solution, you have a standard HW platform. Even if the guy who initially developed the program walks out, you will at least be able to find somebody else who undertands something about the application, and if the program is well structered, understand the program. |
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Hello Kevin, My father and I build a solar fruit dryer. It’s a home-made one, but it worked quite well. We took some insights from the following website: http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/Cooking/cooking.htm It has some projects and links for related websites, it may help you out. But if you already have the dryer system and just want to control it. You can use small application PLCs, for instance the new Siemens S7-1200. http://www.automation.siemens.com/mcms/programmable-logic-controller/en/simatic-s7-controller/s7-1200/Pages/Default.aspx. It is really easy to program it, and it is cheap. You will need to buy, an analog input card and PT100 temperature sensors. Probably you will need a digital output card for controlling the process. Other solutions for controlling your process, is using PIC microcontrollers or FPGAs. The hardware cost is lower than PLCs, however the engineering cost is much higher, that's why I would recommend low cost PLCs! |
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Welcome Kevin! What you should do is find a control engineer and a electronic technician to implement this article for you: ftp://maitelli:web@users.dca.ufrn.br/artigos/COBEP_Secador.pdf In this case you can use FPGA's or microcontrollers. Another possibility is to find a computer programmer instead of electronic tech, and implement the logic on a regular PC. |
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