AUTOMATION OF TEA PROCESSING PLANT

Abstract

Tea industry is the one of the crucial agro based industry of the country as India enjoys the pride of being the major producer, exporter and consumer processed tea. In small and medium scale industry the main concentration is to enhance the production keeping cost as minimum as possible. To reduce the cost, the energy consumption of the machinery must be reduced. It can be reduced by using the machineries efficiently and accurate to the requirement. The process involved in tea industry a rather a critical process as long chain of biochemical reactions takes place. So combining biochemical process with electrical quantities sometime creates problems. An attempt has been taken to automate the tea processing plant with the help of Programmable logic controllers to reduce the energy consumption by the electrical machinery by using it efficiently. Programmable Logic controllers are microprocessor based embedded device which works on the principle of relay logic. It is a very efficient device and used in every industries for automation purpose. PLCs are used field device for SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition). PLC performs the control action and provides information to the SCADA central. As the name implies SCADA is used for distributed system for controlling and monitoring purpose. Implementation of intelligent control technique like fuzzy logic control is rather new and very smart option for control purpose in industrial applications. Fuzzy logic is a soft computing technique of control system mainly used for control of nonlinear and complex system. It also requires expertise knowledge it works on the principle of defining rules according to the system out of the input variables. This thesis is motivated to automate the entire tea processing system with the help of PLC and SCADA. PLC based fuzzy logic control concept is implemented to control some of the process involved in tea processing. For visualization and operate the system automatically corresponding SCADA system is designed. The main objective of this project is to minimize the production cost by reducing the consumption of electrical energy.