Simplify Food Packaging with Paperless Recorders

Reliable control room monitoring is essential Yokogawa’s GX Series recorders deliver advanced precision and performance for power generation, process, and factory automation.

Introduction

A Wisconsin-based dairy operation specializing in low-acid, aseptic packaging has invested close to $100 million in new installations over the past few years. This dairy produces brand-name nutritional drinks, pudding, cheese sauce, and chili mix for many fast-food restaurants.

The customer was eager to go paperless and take advantage of the networking and communication features that come with Yokogawa recorders. Their main focus was initially on the quality of hardware; however, audit trail and electronic signature were a must. The GX was chosen specifically for these reasons in this application.

Application

There are thousands of points that can be monitored on the plant’s newer packaging lines. This application monitors temperatures, multiple flow and tank levels. Validation of the temperature input is crucial to verify their low acid, aseptic packaging process.

‘Low acid’ packaging maintains the dairy products natural pH levels while ‘aseptic’ means the products are 100% sterile at the time of packaging.

Solution

The GX was chosen for the application. All input channel information comes to the GX from existing PLC's. To increase usable channel count the GX was configured to permit the customer to log and display 60 channels using MODBUS RTU communications.

The GX logs the data with audit trail and periodically sends the data files to the main server using the built-in File Transfer Protocol, FTP, function. Customer QC personnel can then review each file and use DAQSignin to apply the FDA required, "electronic signature" to each data file.

Key Advantages

• Data analysis is mobile and straightforward with intelligent functionality.
• Provides intuitive, human-centric design, web-enabled functionality, and scalable architecture.
• Advanced security and wireless communication functions are included.
• The user can draw predicted future waveforms with the user-defined report creation tool.
• Viewer software for data analysis with browser-based real-time monitoring is included.
• Centralized data management via an FTP server and powerful networking functions are standard.