aemcgo0
Member
Ok, I have a upgrade to our brewhouse that I'm having trouble getting my head around how to program.
I have a hot water tank with a 5hp pump on a VFD, and a cold water tank also with a 5hp pump on VFD. Both of these flow into the mash cooker at the first operation of the brew cycle; so, we are looking on blending these two water streams to an operator set temperature using a 3 way blending valve. No problem if we didn't care about the flow rate upstream of the system, just turn both pumps up to full speed and let the PID loop for the 3 way valve modulate the blend for temperature. We do this all day long on our fermentor glycol system.
However, they also want to control flow rate of the now combined and temperature controlled water flow. This will allow the brewers to synchronize the water flow and the grain flow to end at the same time. Is there a way that you can think of, using the pump speeds as the flow rate changer, that will allow me to control both temperature and flow rate in to the mash vessel without adding an additional control valve after the blend?
I'm concerned that when I go to modulate the temperature and flow together it will cause the system to oscillate between two situations, at temperature and not at flow rate, and not at temperature and at flow rate. I think this will make the whole thing unstable and impossible to tune. Any help or ideas in this would be great.
Thanks,
Adam
I have a hot water tank with a 5hp pump on a VFD, and a cold water tank also with a 5hp pump on VFD. Both of these flow into the mash cooker at the first operation of the brew cycle; so, we are looking on blending these two water streams to an operator set temperature using a 3 way blending valve. No problem if we didn't care about the flow rate upstream of the system, just turn both pumps up to full speed and let the PID loop for the 3 way valve modulate the blend for temperature. We do this all day long on our fermentor glycol system.
However, they also want to control flow rate of the now combined and temperature controlled water flow. This will allow the brewers to synchronize the water flow and the grain flow to end at the same time. Is there a way that you can think of, using the pump speeds as the flow rate changer, that will allow me to control both temperature and flow rate in to the mash vessel without adding an additional control valve after the blend?
I'm concerned that when I go to modulate the temperature and flow together it will cause the system to oscillate between two situations, at temperature and not at flow rate, and not at temperature and at flow rate. I think this will make the whole thing unstable and impossible to tune. Any help or ideas in this would be great.
Thanks,
Adam