Soly Import is a fruit and vegetable wholesale business company, specializing in the ripening of bananas. Soly Import has a sales point at the M.I.N. (Marché Interest National) and a ripening facility in Corbas near Lyon.
Soly Import has a storage capacity of 20.000 tons of bananas and has cold storage rooms for up to 25.000 tons of other fruit. The company has a yearly turnover of 30 million Euro.
De Laat Koudetechniek has implemented a new control system which is responsible for the complete cooling process of the bananas in the ripening rooms. The ripening facility at Corbas has eighteen ripening rooms. Every ripening room has capacity to store up to twenty six pallets with banana boxes. All ripening rooms are equipped with a Saphir controller to provide intelligence to the ripening process.
The condenser is hidden by the design of the building
The ripening facility has also four cold stores. An advanced modulated cooling system protects the stored product from drying up. The cells are used for storing exotic fruit sorts (lemons, apples and pears) at a temperature between 0 - 5 °C. Electronic expansion valves measure the temperature and the pressure of the injected refrigerant in order to calculate the amount of refrigerant to inject (direct expansion).
One row with cooling cells
The Reliance Industrial SCADA/HMI system is used to provide independent temperature control in all banana ripening rooms and all cold stores. Reliance also visualizes and controls the Master/Slave cold water machine and the direct expansion cooling machine.
Overview visualization window
Visualization of the cooling process
Settings of the PID controllers
This visualization window shows the process of banana ripening
Country
France
Name
Control system responsible for the complete cooling process of bananas in ripening rooms
Implemented by
De Laat Koudetechniek B.V.
Date
2007
Control System
27 x Siemens Saphir controllers + 27 RCC cards
SCADA software
1x Reliance Runtime with unlimited number of data points
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