Adeel Alimentos increase quality, predictability in their pork-based production line with Elipse E3

Needs

Headquartered in Pará de Minas, one of the main pig farming centers in Minas Gerais state, in the Brazilian southeast, Adeel Alimentos is a swine farmers association that was established to provide high-quality, flavorsome pork-based products to their end customers. Committed to a strict process control in their plant, the company offers their clients distinctive, high-end pork cuts that are among the best available in the Brazilian pig farming market.

To optimize control in their production line, improve the quality of their goods, and reduce breakage, the company has opted for Elipse E3. With the platform by Elipse Software, the global software developer of process management solutions, Adeel Alimentos can control (both remotely and in real time) the whole cooking and natural smoking processes of their products. We must also emphasize the role played by GCEF Engenharia e Automação as the solution provider that implemented our software in the application at Adeel Alimentos.

GCEF was founded in 2017 with the mission to develop electric projects with excellence, in a safe and efficient way, to promote their clients’ competitivity via automation. Headquartered in Guaporé, in the south of Brazil, the company’s highly skilled staff has successfully executed over 1,000 projects in many different industries.

Solution

With Elipse E3, Adeel Alimentos can accurately and reliably set up and control the whole cooking and natural smoking processes of their pork-based product line in the plant’s three smokehouse chambers. Each step of the recipe preparation (which can go up to 16) can be individually configured and controlled for temperature and cooking time.

Elipse E3 can also set up and control the opening and closing of valves used for smoking pork meat in the smokehouses. Consequently, Adeel Alimentos can ramp up (oscillate) temperatures through all steps in food preparation and control smoke flow, to ensure the efficiency, accuracy, and quality of their production line.

The platform also allows not only activating the engines responsible for circulating and exhausting hot air in the smokehouses but also opening valves for incoming steam according to the formulas of the recipes being prepared. Another possibility is turning on the suction system via valves where smoke is pumped directly into the pork meat. For each smokehouse, the name of the current recipe is displayed on screen by Elipse E3 alongside its temperature, total cooking time, and ongoing cooking time.

Two types of reports are issued by Elipse E3 for the analysis and follow-up of recipes preparation at the Adeel Alimentos plant. One of them is the overview report, which monitors the ongoing status of each event (recipe name, smokehouse temperature, start and end times, current preparation stage). The other one is the change history report, where all adjustments to the recipes and alarms are listed.

In addition to the reports, Elipse E3 also assesses the recipe preparation temperatures in the smokehouses via both history and real-time charts. Adeel Alimentos determines which time intervals are monitored in reports and charts and whether to export them, print them, and/or send them in PDF format in order to validate their processes with inspection agencies.

Benefits

To Valmir Pizzi, Adeel Alimentos’s Director, the introduction of Elipse E3 has presented the company with a series of advantages when compared to the results with their previous supervisory system. He mentions that the standout gains in the new system are its predictability, and the cooking/smoking quality of the final product.

“The software by Elipse allows for a more uniform, more predictable production line by remotely controlling all cooking times and temperatures. Currently, we offer premium quality of all products coming out of our smokehouses, and this in turn will reduce the amount of breakage in the process,” says Pizzi.

Among the main benefits Elipse E3 has brought to Adeel Alimentos, we highlight the following:

• Finer control of the time used for cooking and smoking pork meat in the smokehouses, which lowers the previous error margin of manual control.
• Temperature control by hysteresis, which makes for more evenly cooked products with less breakage, due to the precise control of temperature limits by the software.
• A complete, robust PLC working for the smokehouse chambers.
• Operator notes logging the variance in the system.
• More uniform cooking curve, according to the programming.