Adeel Alimentos brings higher quality and predictability to its pork products with Elipse E3

Needs

Headquartered in Pará de Minas, one of the main pig farming centers in Minas Gerais, a state in southeastern Brazil, Adeel Alimentos is a farmer-owned business established to deliver high-quality, flavorful pork-based products to end consumers. Backed by strict process control, the company offers its customers distinctive, high-end cuts that represent the very best in pork.

To optimize production control, further improve the quality of its products, and reduce waste, the company has decided to adopt Elipse E3. With the platform developed by Elipse Software, a global developer of process management software, Adeel Alimentos can control the entire cooking and natural smoking process, remotely and in real time. The solution was implemented by GCEF Engenharia e Automação.

GCEF was founded in 2017, and its mission is to develop high-quality electrical projects safely and efficiently, boosting its clients’ competitiveness through automation. Based in Guaporé, Rio Grande do Sul, in southern Brazil, the company’s highly skilled team has successfully executed over 1,000 projects across a wide range of industries.

Solution

With Elipse E3, Adeel Alimentos can more precisely and reliably set up and control the cooking and natural smoking process of its pork-based product line in the plant’s three smokehouses, ensuring ideal preparation. Each recipe can have up to 16 steps, with temperature and cooking time configured individually.

Elipse E3 can also set up and control the opening and closing times of the valves that let smoke into the smokehouses. This allows Adeel Alimentos to create temperature ramps or variations throughout each recipe’s steps and control smoke flow to ensure the efficiency, precision, and quality of its production.

With Elipse E3, Adeel Alimentos can not only activate the motors responsible for circulating and exhausting hot air in the smokehouses but also open the steam inlet valves according to the cooking requirements of each recipe. The platform can turn on the suction system as well, drawing natural smoke in through the valves. For each smokehouse, the name of the current recipe is displayed on screen by Elipse E3 alongside the temperature, total cooking time, and elapsed cooking time.

Elipse E3 generates two types of reports that make it easier to analyze and monitor recipe preparation at the Adeel Alimentos plant. One of them is the overview report, which shows the status of each event or recipe preparation, including its start time, recipe name, current smokehouse temperature, elapsed time, total time, and current step or cycle. The other is the change history report, which lists all adjustments to the recipes and alarms.

Elipse E3 also monitors the recipe preparation temperatures in the smokehouses through historical and real-time trend charts. Adeel Alimentos can choose the time intervals shown in reports and charts, and export, print, or send them as PDF files. This is a key feature for validating its processes with regulatory agencies.

Benefits

According to Valmir Pizzi, director at Adeel Alimentos, the introduction of Elipse E3 has brought several advantages over the way the process was previously controlled. In his view, the standout gains are in the predictability and quality of both cooking and smoking.

“The software by Elipse allows for more uniform, more predictable production by remotely controlling all cooking times and temperatures. This has significantly improved the final quality of our products, which now leave our smokehouses better cooked and smoked, reducing waste in the process,” says Pizzi.

Other benefits Elipse E3 has brought to Adeel Alimentos include:

• Tighter control of pork cooking and smoking times in the smokehouses, considerably reducing the margin of error compared with the previous manual control.
• Hysteresis-based temperature control, which produces more evenly cooked products with less waste, since the software keeps temperatures from rising above or falling below the ideal cooking range.
• A robust, full-featured PLC controlling the smokehouses.
• Operator notes are recorded when process deviations occur.
• A more uniform cooking curve that follows the programmed recipe.