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A Control-Parameter Data Collecting and Processing System of Grain Drying in A Deep Fixed-Bed
A Control-Parameter Data Collecting and Processing System of Grain Drying in A Deep Fixed-Bed
A Control-Parameter Data Collecting and Processing System of Grain Drying in A Deep Fixed-Bed
in a Deep Fixed-Bed
Danyang Wang1, Chenghua Li 2,* , Jiangning Xu3, Benhua Zhang1, Yuanjuan Gong1
1. College of Engineering, Shenyang Agricultural University, Shenyang 110161, China
2. College of Mechanical Engineering, Shenyang Ligong University, Shenyang 110161, China
3. College of Information and Electrical Engineering, Shenyang Agricultural University,
Shenyang, 110161, China
*
Email : lch@syau.edu.cn,lch@mail.sylu.edu.cn
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humility and air velocity and other parameters The main parameters which need to be measured
respectively at drying chamber inlet and outlet all have and monitored by the hot air drying system working
an important effect on drying efficiency and include the following five parts:(1) drying air
quality(Zheng Xianzhe et al., 2001; Zhang Yonglin et temperature and humidity at drying chamber inlet and
al., 2007). Therefore, the research on the influence outlet respectively, (2) drying air temperature and
laws of each factor on drying efficiency and quality is humidity at each test point in every grain layer, (3)
so particularly important that it will be reasonable to drying air velocity at each test point in every grain
control these parameters in practical production (Chen layer, (4) weight of each test point in each grain-layer,
Jianping et al., 2009; Chen Kunjie et al., 2001; Wang (5) supply pressure of air compressor (Wang Danyang.
Feng et al., 2008). As grain drying is a process of 2005).
unsteady heat and mass transfer, all correlated
parameter-values of each state point change greatly
during the drying process, which has put forward
higher demand to the method for parameter monitoring
and controlling. The traditional method for parameter
monitoring and controlling is manual record and
artificial process, the method of which has some
shortcomings, including low precision, low safety, low
efficiency, tiresome procedure, and big error etc. while
computer software and hardware technique of high
speed development provide a doable method for
automatic monitoring of experimental parameters ,and
for experimental data automatic collection, display and
1. drying cha mbe r 2. rota ry s e pa ra te r 3. fe e d inle t 4.
automatic saving (Chen Yuanyuan et al., 2008; Fu Yu s e ns ors 5. ma te ria l dis cha rge 6. e le ctronic digita l
et al., 2006; Li Changyou et al., 2002). In this work, a te mpe ra ture me a s ure r 7. MCU s ys te m 8. ma s te r
system with double host of master computer and slave compute r 9. he a te r 10. control va lve 11. e xha us t pipe
computer was adopted to realize the automatic for s ta ble pre s s ure 12. a ir compre s s or 13. pre s s ure
collection and process of each important working ga uge 14. rota me te r
parameter during the drying process, and combined Figure 1. Structure of drying test bed
with specific paddy drying experiments on a deep
fixed-bed; the system reliability and its function will be 3. Data collecting and processing system
wholly verified. design for hot air drying
2. Hot air drying system and control 3.1 Hardware design for data collecting and
parameter processing system
Drying experiments were conducted using a hot air According to the requirement of grain drying
drying type system. The system basically consists of air experiment, a data acquisition and processing system was
compressor, rotameter, heater, drying chamber and designed, the hardware composition as shown in fig.2.
MCU system, the structure of it as shown in fig.1. The Microprocessor is as core processing unit of the system.
airflow with stable pressure which was afford by the air As the information is not too large with the system
compressor flows through the control valve and the working, and the information processing speed required
rotameter, and then it is transported to the drying for the system is low relatively, AT89C52 was chosen as
chamber to dry the inside-materials after it is heated by core microcontroller for the system based on the
the heater. Some test holes in the drying chamber are comparative analysis of different microcontrollers’
used for measuring temperature, humidity and other performance, price and control functions. Hardware circuit
parameter values of each grain layer. In each drying design mainly includes signal collection module and
experiment, moisture contents of each test point in each communication module etc.
grain-layer will be obtained through weight DS18B20 1-wire digital temperature sensor was
measurement of each test point by a special sampler selected for the system. Its temperature measuring
every certain interval until all the moisture contents of
test points come up to the safe storage standard, that is
the end of drying experiment.
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for communication before the related
connection.MAX232 of RS-232 was selected as level
conversion chip for the system, the connection circuit
of level conversion as shown in fig.4.
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module used in timed sending the data collected and 3.2.2. Software design for data acquisition and data
receiving the parameters from PC in interrupt mode. processing of master computer. The hardware of data
The MCU control system composed of main program, acquisition and processing system for the drying test
timed interrupt service routine, receiving interrupt bed was composed of PC and AT89C52 (slave
service routine and the three sub modules mentioned computer), and software was developed with Excel and
above. Microcomputer, timer, interrupt and initialization VBA on the Windows operation platform. RS-232 data
of serial communication were concerned firstly in the communication line was used to realize the
main program. By the Program executing, the system is communication between the master computer and the
initialized firstly and then comes into a circulatory state. slave computer, by which all the parameters collected
The main program flow as shown in fig.6. Data real-timely by the slave computer could be sent to the
collection and display of drying air temperature, master computer. For the data processing software of
humidity and velocity respectively are all completed the master computer, Serial communication is realized
based on the interrupt program, and the program flow of based on the MS Comm communication control
temperature data acquisition as shown in fig.7. provided by visual basic 6.0. The data acquisition
software adopts event-driven data communication
mode and a timer to open timed communication ports,
then the data uploaded from the slave computer could
be received and transmission errors of communication
could be captured. Then data uploaded from the slave
computer can be checked based on serial
communication protocol, and from which each related
parameter will be extracted. The final functions mainly
include as followings:(1) Dynamic display of data
collected,(2) Pretreatment of experimental data (such
as error control of data), (3) Calculation of original
data according to experiment requirement, (4) special
program for diagram drawing according to the
calculation results, (5) index analysis for single factor
experiments and regression analysis for multifactor
experiments.
Automatic, fast and accurate processing of
experiment data can be realized based on the software
Figure 6. Startup flow of main program platform, which provide technical support for the
research of grain drying. The operation interface of the
system developed as shown in fig.8.
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4. Experiments and result analysis Application results of the data collecting and
processing system developed for hot air drying show
Experiments of paddy drying in the deep fixed-bed that the system works stably and reliably, and data from
were conducted by using the system developedˈand different sensors could be collected and uploaded real-
functions and reliability of the system were validated in timely according to the requirement of experiment, so
fieldwork. According to the requirement of technology labor intensity and interference on data processing of
development for paddy rice drying, drying air velocity, manual operation cloud be decreased during the drying
drying air temperature and paddy thickness were experimental study. Furthermore, coherence and
selected as factors, while additional crack percentage, stability of experiment process are effectively
drying homogeneous degreeˈtotal average drying rate guaranteed, drying efficiency is improved. Manual
and drying time were selected as experiment indexes. method for data processing and the software developed
The experiment process was described in details by for data processing were both used to process and
Wang et al. (2005). Besides 25 single factor analysis the original experiment data collected
experiments, orthogonal rotary experimental design separately. By comparative analysis with the two
method was used in multifactor experiment, and then methods based on the same group experiment data, it is
the total number of the experiment is 48. clear that the time consumption of the manual
In order to improve the experimental precision and calculation and graphics processing (in a skilled case)
make the experimental results analysis more deeply and at least needs 2 minutes and 20 minutes respectively, so
conveniently, all the signal data of each experiment must the whole time of manual method for data processing
be processed as following four aspects: (1) calculation on based on all the 48 experiments at least need about
the transforming of real-time weight of each test point in 22×48=1056 minutes, which is furthermore added to
every grain-layer for real-time moisture content(d.b) and the time for drawing and regression analysis based on
average drying rate.(2)drawing based on the real-time each drying index, at least 2.5 working days must be
temperature data of each test point (3) drawing based on needed for the work. Moreover, influence of manual
the real-time drying air velocity data at each test point (4) operation on processing results was hard to be
According to the results of quadratic orthogonal excluded in lots of duplicate work. On the contrary, by
experiment, the optimal technological condition was using the data collecting and processing system
determined with regression analysis and variance analysis developed the time consumption for single factor
method. Draw relevant analysis chart was drawn and experiment only needs 75 seconds, for Multi-factor
principal component analysis (PCA) was conducted. Thus experiment only needs 240 seconds. Reliability and
there were 5175 times numerical calculation on productivity of data processing in the test bed have
transforming, and 690 graph drawings needed. All of this both improved; moreover, the system provides a
is a very heavy work, while the soft system developed powerful tool for research on materials drying law.
makes it easy. Analysis result chart (partly shown) of a
single drying index which was generated by the system as 5. Conclusions
shown in fig.9.
In accordance with the backward situation of
automatic measurement and control of grain drying
equipment in our country, the purpose of this study was
to improve the drying parameters acquisition precision
and operation environment of grain drying processing.
The control-parameter acquisition and processing
system developed for the grain drying test-bed was
designed and verified based on the single factor
experiment and multifactor experiment of paddy drying
on a deep fixed test bed. The results indicated that the
control-parameter acquisition and processing system
developed for the grain drying test-bed could achieve
all the designed functions and achieve the desired
application results, but further improvement on the
Figure 9. Curve automatic generated by the system accuracy and real-time of grain moisture content
(partly) measurement is needed. Overall, the data collecting
and processing system designed has a good application
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value and guiding significance for grain drying
procedure.
6. References
[1]J.P. Chen, H. Z. Zhang, S.J. Ouyang, et al. “Design and
implementation of solar agricultural byproduct intelligent
drying system”, Computer Engineering and Design,
2009,30(10):2593-2596(in Chinese)
[8]F. Wang, M. Dong, Y.B. Jin. “An Effective and Low Cost
Dryer Equipment of Farming based on SCM”,
Microcomputer Information, 2008, 24(8):107-108,146(in
Chinese)
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