How modern instrumentation is enabling smarter bulk solids inventory management

Hi, and welcome to Processing Proves, a series through ear-on-processing. On this series, we're joined by engineers, executives, and other thought leaders in the process manufacturing sector to cover a variety of topics you need to know to better manage your industrial process operations and to maximize product quality output and profitability. And now onto the episode. Hi, I'm Nate Todd, Senior Editor at Processing. Accurate bulk solids measurement goes beyond knowing how much material is stored in a silo. Today I'm joined by Keith Riley and Ola Westrum of Enderson Hauser to discuss how smarter instrumentation can improve visibility, support proactive maintenance, and help operations teams make more informed decisions. Keith Riley is Enderson Hauser's level and pressure national product manager. And Ola Westrum is the company's food and beverage industry manager. Thanks for speaking with me today, gentlemen. Our pleasure. Thank you. To start, what are the biggest challenges manufacturers face when trying to accurately monitor bulk solids inventory and material conditions inside silos? I'll answer that from a historical perspective. bulk solids and a silo have tended to be a little challenging for a number of reasons compared to liquid. You don't have the nice flat surface. You have your angles of repose, which are constantly shifting depending upon if you're filling, if you're draining, things of that nature going on to try to get a good reliable signal back from the product as far as a level signal is concerned. This is a historical challenge that we faced. That's why guided wave radar, which is either with a solid rod or more commonly in bulk solids with a cable, guides that signal down, do get a good response back from it, that it is contact. If you have a large silo with things like sweeps or other things in it, then those are other challenges that you have to work around. So those are some of the traditional challenges that we've dealt with with reliable level measurement in those silos. Okay, how does 80 gigahertz of radar technology improve level measurement in silos containing powders and other bulk solids? Well, that 80 gigahertz technology really gives us a lot of advantages now. First and foremost, everybody's familiar with is the smaller beam angle. Now I'm not as concerned with an angle of repose because I can get return off of relatively small particle sizes of my solids, not the larger averaging beam that you had with a 26, but it's more narrow. So I can get more reliable return signals without worrying about alignment or loss of it. So that's one thing, too. It does do a good job of seeing through the dust and everything of that nature. It also gives us a longer measurement distance capability than we would have had with both 26 gigahertz free space radars. And beyond the frequency discussion is the other value that we've been added into these new products, things like build up detection on the horn from the dust, which can have in the past been a problem that it mutes the signal, starts to cause issues. So then you have to clean it off or anything of that nature. And it was more or less based on experience. And you know, okay, about every three days, we have to go up there and clean that antenna to make sure that it's working properly. The algorithms and the functionality of the device now or such that we can readily detect when build up starts to happen, inform the control room, maybe go ahead and initiate the valve to do the air purge automatically without anybody having to touch it, makes it much easier for them to manage and maintain that way. Okay. And let all measurement tells us how much material is in a silo, but not necessarily what condition it's in, how can multipoint temperature sensors complement radar measurements to provide more complete picture of the stored material. Obviously with large silos, depending upon the product that's in there, it isn't always in the same condition when it gets loaded. Let's just take grains as an example. You have varying moisture levels with the grains. And now we're back also to that sweet concept. That's one of the reasons we're using sweeps to keep that mixed up and keep from getting one particular spot that's maybe as higher moisture, which then starts to have an issue with the grain, which can generate hot spots. And that can create issues with both the quality and it's a safety issue as well so there be enough heat be generated. That multipoint temperature identifies whether or not you're having any hot spots or whether there's any significant graduation in the temperature between the levels inside the silo. So it does provide some good valuable information to the end user that way. Okay. Maybe I can fill in a little bit on that as well on the safety spot once you let's say especially in grain or corn silos and so on or anything with powder and there is a product loss aspect of that as well when you get into the temperature and moisture content of a grain. Obviously they try to store the grain or harvest when it's dry, it gets dried before it gets put into the silos, but you can still get moisture ingress into the silos, which then by monitoring the temperature or the moisture in the silo, you can detect that early if you need to do something about it. Statistics vary a little bit about how much grain is damaged due to moisture annually but it's somewhere in the free to 20% range, you know, that could happen just because moisture getting into the ingress into the silos or the grain had higher moisture content to start with. So that then you have a spoilage aspect of it which you can help identify using temperature sensors. However aspect that keeps touch on a little bit as well, statistically there are between eight and ten silo explosions in the United States every year. That's due to hot pockets developing inside the grain which convinced spontaneously combust. So obviously by monitoring the temperature continuously inside the silos rather than just doing spot checks, those safety aspects can be avoided or a dangerous situation can be avoided as well. Okay, that makes sense. And are there any other special considerations for instrumentation strategies with food ingredients versus, say, chemicals or other types of ingredients? Not really. Obviously you need to make sure you're possibly, you need to use food grade materials and things that are good contact with the raw ingredients. Since we're generally dealing with grains and corn and soy and so on that have yet to be processed at that side of things, things are generally not as, let's say, critical from a hygienic perspective, obviously when you moved into more finished products, if you get into milk powder, sugars and other, let's say, finished for consumer type of applications or usages, then the degree of, let's say, hygienic design and food contact material has to be taken into consideration as well. Okay. How can manufacturers turn real time silo measurements into actionable operational decisions that can help improve inventory accuracy or manage material rotation or reduce waste, which I believe you mentioned, and to plan re-stopping or replenishment? If you want to think that one, there's a lot of different ways. We touched upon one of them. I mean, let's just take the whole maintenance aspect of it first. We're seeing a lot of attrition in all sorts of plants and bulk storage for grains is no different. So anything the instrument can do to help with the more proactive maintenance information, like build up, like dust, like just the health of the device in general, is going to lead to that productivity beyond just the measurement needs. So that's really a big savings. I mean, quite honestly, none of these guys, myself included, want to regularly crawl up on top of a 50, 60, 80-foot tall silo and be doing any work or going through tests or maintenance of the device. So the device now, things like heartbeat verification, can identify the health that's operating well. You can put trust in the output that you're seeing of the device. It's something that can be done in situ, no loss of signal back to the control. And again, no worry about losing the signal from dust, from build up, which again goes to maintenance, goes to whoops, how much do I have in here? I'm blind for the moment. So all of those things go to that operational aspect that you're talking about, helping them better determine what the volume in that vessel or the silo is and what actions they may or may not need to take, obviously. Keith, hit the nail on the head there, trust in the measurement is key. And I think in the past, going back some years, people might have tried using ultrasonic. They've used guided wave radar, they've used different technologies over the years with mixed results. And I think that's been a challenge in the industry, there's that we tried it, didn't really work. We didn't get a better return investment from it. So now we're just doing manual checks. Of course manual checks could be a safety issue. It's a labor issue as well. And now when we've moved to a much, much more reliable way of measuring, so the actual instrumentation itself to do the measurement is so much more reliable today, people can trust in that measurement. But now you can actually do something with that information to your point on your questions, but what is that information used for? Well, now you can really plan your production. You make sure that you're not running out of your product. You can make sure you can even have, let's say a vendor managed type of supplies chain, you know, where you say you don't even have to worry about it. Am I going to run out of flour today? My supplier already knows that I'm running low, they can then schedule the deliveries for it here. get into that whole supply chain. reliability in a completely different mode compared to what you may have been able to do in the past when you had to rely more on an annual waste of measuring. Okay. And along those lines, can you talk about how these digital instruments and IOT platforms are connecting silo-level measurements to plant-wide and enterprise-wide systems? Oh, sure. Yeah, there are many ways. It's pretty much up to the user to decide how they want to do that. Obviously, step one is usually you bring it into, let's say, a PLC over-control system so that you're using it from a control's perspective. But more and more today, you can use various types of edge devices to send that information up to an ERP or other cloud-based solutions or on-premise solutions for complete inventory monitoring to monitor in and out so you know exactly what you have on hand at any given time. And of course, being, let's say, cloud-based, if you choose to go that way, this information can then also be shared with suppliers and/or customers and say, "What do you have on my hand?" And how do we plan, let's say, beyond just our own production facility? And I'll go a little bit more granular on that, Nate. I mean, that's one of the reasons we're seeing more and more interest in, I'm just going to call it industrial Ethernet technologies as well. And it goes right to what Ola was talking about, about cloud-based or other types of systems that are out there. It's a bit of a transition because everybody, even though they might have used heart, typically only use that for setup or troubleshooting. They certainly are not using heart on a day-to-day basis in most cases, okay. But going to an industrial Ethernet concept, it gets you a lot more information out of those instruments that they already have in there but has been somewhat landlocked because of the control systems in play. And it also goes to the point of you can send the primary variable, your level measurement to your control system, let them work the way they always have work. But a lot of this other thing, like the predictive maintenance, some of these other pieces of information can be sent to a second PLC or to Ola's point to a cloud-based system. And then maintenance people can be in there, not in the control system. And it gives them a better environment to do their work and it gives better visibility to the organization as a whole to that information. Okay, and that connectedness also I assume would impact how operators can prioritize the maintenance across of kind of a large silo network as well. Absolutely. Okay, for manufacturers looking to modernize their bulk solid measurement, where should they start and what are the most important factors to consider when they're evaluating instrumentation and digital connectivity options? Maybe I'll take that one then. So obviously it comes down to like any business decision you need to understand, you know, what will have the shortest and best return on your investment. What are the critical measurements that you really need to be have this ability to and what are the ones that are maybe good to know. And then you start prioritizing say, okay, we have, you know, the scale of it's going to be different. It's completely different. Obviously if you have two or three silos versus if you have 30 or 40 silos, it's like, how do you do that? Obviously it's going to be a completely different capital expenditure depending on the scale that you're operating under. So really like with any project, you need to determine is like what return investment that we get from this, what is the value, who's going to get this information, who's going to act on it. Then after that, once you've decided that, then you look at what are the measurements that you need. Usually you're going to start with level that's by far the most common one we see, but to my point earlier, the safety aspect of it as well and quality. So now you get into the temperature measurement, you get into moisture measurement, you might need to have some high level alarms or low level alarms as well. So you kind of need to prioritize, you know, what is the risk level you have and what are the things you must have versus what would be good to have. Okay. And is there anything else that you think we haven't touched on that's important to know about both solids level measurement these days. I think one thing that I see is planning ahead, we see a lot of silos being constructed that do not have or do not accommodate for installation of sensors either from the side or from the top. So I think that something that unfortunately sometimes may be the silo designers don't really pay attention to they build a silo for the sake of storing something in it and at times they either don't know or forget about putting a port on the top or the side where somebody can actually put a level measurement or a temperature measurement type of device in. And then the end users had to go in and potentially get a hole in the top of a silo that should have had a port in the first place. So I think both of the challenges we run into people want to do the measurement that then they realize, oh, we don't have anywhere to actually install it. And as an instrumentation company that makes me think how frequently are you working with OEMs versus working with end users, are you typically working with the end users. We work with both we work with the OEMs silo manufacturers tank manufacturers as well, we can catch them all unfortunately though. And of course you also have a relatively large install base of silos and especially when you get into let's say older to say concrete based silos and so on that have been there for many many years, I mean they last 50 60 70 years sometimes you know these silos, it's not like you have an opportunity to go back in and do things on those older installations. I've been involved in the number of them we've been there with jack cameras on the top of the silos and making a hole to feel to put a sensor in it's doable. It's not the greatest way to address an installation. All right, well, thank you so much for speaking with me today Keith and all it was great talking to you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you Nate, we appreciate it. Thank you for listening to your own processing this program is produced by endeavor business media, a division of endeavor B to B. 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