Distillery Yeast

When Mauri Products Ltd required a new plant for a famous single malt whisky distillery, they approached Concept Controls Ltd to assist them with a control system.

As we have worked together on many plants in the past, they had a clear requirement for a highly sophisticated automatic dosing system, with integrated Clean In place (CIP), which would deliver Creamed Liquid Yeast to the Wort Line and hence into the Mash Tuns.

By working together over several years, Concept and Mauri have developed a highly automated system that provides very high levels of control, and hence providing a very sophisticated and reliable system. The design has been refined to remove all surplus equipment, and thus ensure that there are a very limited number of potential failure points, but to retain the functionality expected from plants having many more active components.

This system is delivered as a packaged Control Panel, with twin PLCs, and two separate panels. Each of the panels has been refined to include an HMI for advanced functionality, parameter viewing and adjustment, logging, and engineering. However all the normal plant operations are provided with a highly ergonomic Key switch, Push Button and Lamp system. This gives an optimal balance between ease of use, and hence low cost of training, and high levels of sophistication to allow product and batch tracking.

For this project Mauri provided the installation and wiring resources, with Concept providing not only the panels, the electrical drawings, software and system manuals, but also providing engineering resources for Commissioning, and Customisation to meet the Distilleries specific requirements. This cooperation means that the overall costs have been kept under control, whilst the level of sophistication far exceeds the level that would normally be expected by a customer preparing a fixed FDS without the benefit of an interactive engineering resource.

Note that this system is connected to a sophisticated Telemetery System, via a GSM Modem, as the Mobile signal was adequate even in this remote area of Scotland. This System provides Mauri with an hourly log of the key process conditions on site, some 400 miles away in their office in Kingston Upon Hull. Concept can also access the control system via this connection, and thus can provide full diagnostics, and can perform remote software modifications and adjustments without the high costs involved in travelling 1000 miles to attend site.