Food Industry: breakthrough probe for Process Control and Asset Monitoring

How to get even closer to the critical control points in your processes? How to save time, resources and money while increasing throughput and food safety? The F&B Industry engineer tool box now includes unique sensors to get easily the temperature at the heart of the food during cooking, and at the heart of the most critical equipment on your production chain.or, integrate optimally within an existing monitoring infrastructure – even as retrofit. SENSeOR’s economic solution offers a well differentiated IOT platform.

Chefs can talk about the interest of knowing precisely the core temperature of the food being cooked, to obtain the best quality and most tasty dishes. They often rely on battery-powered probes or wired probes, but know their drawbacks and limits: “cumbersome cables”, “battery management and replacement”, ”not suitable for high or low temperatures”, “uneasy to clean” are listed among others.

In the professional kitchen, and even more in the food processing plants, the wired probes also induce a lack of continuity over the whole process, along the production chain, or from the oven to the blast chiller, from the bratt pan to the freezer...

These drawbacks can now be overcome thanks to a revolutionary technology – Surface Acoustic Waves – used in the design of unique wireless batteryless temperature sensors, and integrating into a modular monitoring platform, suitable to equip a 10-level professional oven in a restaurant as well as a tunnel/pass-through oven in a food factory or the rotating racks of a bakery oven.

The food probe, without cable and without battery, is inserted in the cooked food and enables to control continuously the temperature at the heart of it, in order to adjust precisely and in real-time the cooking temperature and duration, leading to optimal food safety and quality, with efficient use of resources (electricity, water, equipment, time, staff etc.).

The OEM version of the interrogation unit can be integrated to the equipment electronics for direct control from the panel, or the solution can be used as a stand-alone system.

To help operators cope with HACCP processes, the system manages user-programmable critical control points and alarm thresholds and records data in a centralized system if applicable, or on a local SD-card.

A low-cost RFID-reader module can also be added, to read out the tag associated to the temperature of a food piece on a moving carrier for instance.

Besides inner temperature food measurement during the processes, the SAW sensors can also bring benefits in the F&B plants, as an enabler for precise condition-based maintenance program for the manufacturing assets, especially the rotating machines and electrical assets like transformers or generators, with other models of wireless batteryless temperature sensors (industrial probes, surface mounting sensors, plugs etc.).

Such continuous surveillance on critical points of the machines not accessible with standard sensors enables preventive maintenance only when required – but before it’s too late – and leads to optimized asset use, reduced life-cycle costs thanks to reduced number of failures and repairs and improved throughputs on the whole production chain. It provides a key, reliable indicator to plant managers that they can act-on, helping them to optimize their processes to deliver perfect products, even in changing and challenging environments, and at optimal use of resources.

About SENSeOR
SENSeOR provides modular, simple yet comprehensive monitoring solutions combining Surface Acoustic Waves (SAW) and IoT technologies. The unique wireless batteryless temperature sensors enable precise continuous control where no other sensor fits.
SENSeOR, your asset optimizer - www.senseor.com - contact@senseor.com