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Project Profile

Carrot Production in the Sunshine State

Industry: Manufacturing

Overview

A Genesis II Control System has been installed on the premises of Kalfresh Pty Ltd.

Situated in Kalbar, just southwest of Brisbane, Kalfresh is one of Australia's leading suppliers of fresh carrots to major supermarket chains, and to the export market.

Challenge

Kalfresh produces two grades of carrots - A-grade carrots, which are suitable for supermarkets and export, and B-grade carrots, which are suitable for livestock. Prior to this installation, the standard chilling process used by Kalfresh was causing the carrots to crack. The cracking was a result of the produce being unevenly chilled, and ultimately led to a higher-than-acceptable quantity of carrots being sold as B-grade.

Innotech's goal was to install a control system that would improve the chilling process, and enable efficient loading and unloading of carrots.

As the faciltiy contains a large number of conveyors and machinery, it was necessary to provide Kalfresh with a system that was networkable and flexible enough to perform a multitude of tasks, while remaining user friendly.

As installation took place during carrot picking season, it was also important that work cause minimal disruption to the Kalfresh team.

Site Logistics

Kalfresh is situated in an agricultural district just one and a half hours drive from Brisbane.

The production facility consists of 3 main areas:-

Vehicle unloading
Carrot washing/chilling
Packaging, storage and dispatch preparation

Solution

The solution to meet Kalfresh's requirements was to use a variety of control equipment. Nine Genesis II Controllers were installed in four mechanical switchboards to facilitate control of:-

Conveyor loading
Water chilling
Conveyor unloading
Coldrooms and freezer rooms
Refrigeration capacity control of the rack compressors and condenser fans

A touchscreen interface, featuring Innotech's Magellan software, provides an operator interface for the system. The entire system is connected via a local area network (LAN).

The control strategy implemented allows the operator to select a number of conveyors to load pre-washed carrots into any of the facility's nine bunkers. The water temperature in each bunker is controlled primarily from the common cooling coils and supplemented by variable speed water pumps.

Blowers on each bunker disperse the carrots when loading to ensure each carrot is completely submersed in the pre-cooled water. Once chilled, elevators unload the carrots onto conveyors. The carrots are then packaged and stored in coldrooms that maintain their temperature, ensuring they retain their A-grade condition.

Summary

This leading edge cooling technique is an industry first and has proved to be very successful.

According to Robert Hinrichsen, Managing Director of Kalfresh, this is due to the flexibility and user-friendliness of the Genesis II Control System. Mr Hinrichsen was also pleased that installation of the control system caused very little disruption to the facility's production process.

Key Functions