Visualization and control of the cooling process in banana ripening rooms at Soly Import, France

Soly Import is a fruit and vegetable wholesale business company specializing in the import and distribution of a wide range of fruits and vegetables. 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 fruits. The company has an annual turnover of more than €30 million.

Control system

The Dutch company De Laat Koudetechniek has implemented a new control system responsible for the monitoring and control of the cooling process in Soly Import's banana ripening rooms. The ripening facility in the town of Corbas has 18 ripening rooms. Every ripening room can store up to 26 pallets with banana boxes. All ripening rooms are equipped with Siemens Saphir controllers to provide intelligence to the ripening process.

The heat exchanger is hidden by the design of the building

The ripening facility has also four cold stores. An advanced cooling system protects the stored product from drying up. The cells are used for storing not only exotic fruits (e.g., lemons), but also apples and pears at a temperature range of 0 °C to 5 °C. Electronic expansion valves measure the temperature and pressure of the injected refrigerant in order to calculate the amount of refrigerant to inject (direct expansion).

Soly Import's ripening rooms

To monitor and control the cooling process in the banana ripening rooms and cold stores, the Reliance SCADA/HMI system is used. Reliance also visualizes and controls the master/slave cold water machine and the direct expansion cooling machine.

Examples of visualization windows

The overview visualization window

Visualization of the cooling process

PID controllers' setup

A trend showing the banana ripening process in a room

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