Control system of brewing malt production in Malteries Franco Belges, France

Malteries Franco-Belges (MFB) is a division of the Soufflet group, one of France's leading grain companies. MFB has many malting plants in Europe, one of them is located in Pithiviers near Paris, in France. With production of 600,000 tons per year, it's the largest producer of brewing malt in France. Many breweries use Franco-Belges green malt as a high quality raw material for their beer production.

MFB oversees the entire production process, from seed selection, to suppling malt to the breweries. For each variety of barley, the malting plant uses a unique malting process. This makes it possible to transfer the unique characteristics of each variety of barley to green malt. In addition, the company provides cultivation of malting barley cultivars. Cultivars are constantly being tested in more than twenty trial fields. The malting plant also provides its seed to local farmers.

A steep filling with grain

The Franco-Belges malting plant in Pithiviers cooperates closely with other French malting plants in Champagne, Lorraine, Beauce-Gatinais, and Bourgogne. The companies share their best barley-growing areas in France and use them for cultivation and growing of malting barley. Malteries Franco-Belges is the largest supplier of the green malt in the world. Its customers are well-known breweries like Heineken, Carlsberg, Interbrew, Paulaner, Lowenbrau, Murphy's, Sapporo and many more.

Control System

In 2007, a new SCADA-based Control System of brewing malt production was implemented in the malting plant in Pithiviers, France. The whole contract was carried out by the Czech company PROTECO s.r.o. The Control System, installed in the malting plant, consists of one Tecomat TC700 PLC device located in the distribution box and one operator panel TOUCH51 with a touch screen used for control of the production process. Communication between the Tecomat PLC and the operator panel is provided over the Ethernet.

Control and visualization is provided by the Reliance SCADA/HMI System installed on the operator panel. Operators can control the production of brewing malt over several visualization windows which can be displayed on the operator panel. For example, Reliance provides visualization of the following technologies: steeping, germination, kilning, expedition, energy consumption, burners, etc. Reliance also provides display of historical alarms/events, trends or display failures of any device or machine. The Reliance Runtime Control software and visualization windows are completely localized to the French language.

Examples of visualization windows

Visualization of the brewing malt production

Expedition of the brewing malt

Settings