Our main responsibility is maintenance of equipment in our brewery. The beer production process is as follows: Malt Milling > Mashing > Fermentation > Aging > Filtration > Bottling/Canning > Shipping.
A centrifugal separator is used in the process, and we utilize the WE7000 PC-Based Measurement Instrument to ensure that the separator is running normally and not clogging up.Engineering Dept., Tonegawa Brewery, SUNTORY Ltd.

The separator is a device that uses centrifugal force to remove proteins and other substances in the beer. The volume of separated waste depends on the amount of water and pressure used in the process. If the waste is not discharged property, the quality of the beer can be worth. Therefore the centrifugal separator is the extremely important equipment for the beer production. In case that the separator clogged or breaks down, it may take 6-8 hours to repair and thus it makes a terrible effect on the production line.

Therefore we discussed introducing in the WE7000 to prevent breakdowns. The discharge process is very short, so we must detect the trouble immediately. Since the WE7000 has modules that support various kind of signals, we can choose the module that fits our requirements. As we can quickly transfer our data to PC, we can diagnosis the failure promptly and can investigate the effects which cause the current fluctuation by using the waveform determination function. In addition, and we also can acquire data at both high and low speeds and use average values to control the trends.

, Before introducing the WE7000, we would disassemble the separator to search the trouble. However this took a lot of time and sometimes lost reliability in our data. Now, by connecting the WE7000 to a PC, we can accumulate acquired data and display waveforms immediately. After about half a year, we can search the malfunction trend and thus can find the problems on electrical components without halting the process. Moreover, we also can continue to use the several parts until the malfunction trend is detected and thus we decrease the waste of parts.