P22302: Thermal Control at MashTun

Hello, we are the Thermal control at the MashTun team. This is our MSD project. Our project was based on a problem faced in a brewery, where their final water temperature reading was inaccurate and the process was manually controlled by the brewer. Our goal was to automate this process saving the brewer valuable time and providing accurate temperature readings. Few of the constraints that we had to work with not interrupting the existing piping system and devices within the brewery. The current process is, hot water is set in a hot liquor tank at the desired temperature. The hot water flows through the piping system, the brewer manually releases cold water which is connected parallel to the hot water to get his desired mixed water temperature flow. In our system design, the team decided to create an automated stepper motor valve fixture with an HMI system that reads the temperature of an RTD temperature sensor. Our automated stepper motor valve consists of a needle valve and stepper motor connected via a performance coupling and held together by a 3D-printed fixture. This allows us to precisely control the valve with the stepper motor by a PID algorithm. Our HMI system consists of a 7 SEGMENT DISPLAY, Buzzer, Rotary, encoders/buttons, LEDs, Text display, Low voltage power supply (for the microcontroller) , High voltage power supply (for the motor), RTD interpretation circuit, Motor controller, Microcontroller mounted on the back of PCB (STM Nucleo board). This would allow us to control the temperature of the system and display the error of messages within the system.