Reprinted from GRAIN JOURNAL March/April 2020 Issue
For this survey article, Grain Journal asked operations personnel for the most influential technologies they see when it comes to facility design.
Ross McEllhiney
Project Manager
Louis Dreyfus Co.
Kansas City, MO
“The concept of virtual plant design and cloud-point scanning have had the biggest effects on the way we do business. It has been a huge change in our methodologies, the cost of our projects, and our ability to accomplish them.
“Regarding equipment, there hasn’t been any revolutionary changes recently, it’s more of an evolutionary process that’s happened over time. But the whole engineering side – doing virtual plants, desktop plant scanning, and design – has been revolutionary. It has changed the way we build plants.
“For example, we can pre-build a lot more stuff now than we could in the past. Things fit accurately. You can bring big pieces of equipment on site and install them. You can pre-build major sections of your plant and expect them to fit. You couldn’t do that in the past – it just wouldn’t fit, because the accuracy wasn’t there. Now, you can take 100,000 measurements today, as opposed to whatever you could measure with a tape measure. So, you’re going from 1,000 measurements on a plant and some old drawings to 100,000 or maybe 1 million measurements on a facility with a rate of accuracy that’s plus or minus a couple of millimeters. So this technology has radically changed the way we do things and how much it costs.
“It’s much less expensive to build things under a roof in some factory than it is to do it out in the weather, out at the facility. So we’re seeing a big shift toward building things at a higher level of completion on the factory floor at significantly reduced costs. The person standing in the field getting paid per diem, they are getting additional pay because they’re more talented or willing to travel to the location. And so that’s more expensive than the person who works at the shop.
“It’s also much safer to do pre-fabrication, because you’re not building things at heights or in bad conditions. The cost of pre-fabricated plants are about half the price of those built in the field, so there’s a huge cost savings. It’s kind of like modular housing. Modular housing is significantly less expensive than stick-building a home. It has its difficulties, but there is value in it if you can work out the downsides.
“Lastly, I think these technologies have become more affordable in the past 10 years, even more so in the past five years. augmented reality and virtual reality equipment costs have gone down radically, so you can afford to apply these tools to your operation.
The augmented reality tools are just a couple of years old. They’re making a difference in the way we do things. We can go to a brownfield job site today, hold up an iPad, and it knows where you are in the plant. From there, it will project your new equipment into the view that you see on the screen of the iPad. This stuff just didn’t exist three years ago. We couldn’t have done it. Contractors and engineers are just starting to learn about this technology. But there’s no question that, five years from now, if you don’t do this thing, you will go of the business. You just won’t be able to compete anymore.”
Eric Clements
Operations Manager
Topflight Grain Cooperative
Bement, IL
“One of the things I’ve seen is an increase in facility automation. Some of the costs have come down to a level of affordability for many companies. They’ve found better ways and easier ways to automate facilities.
“One of the reasons why we look to automate facilities is to become leaner. If we don’t need somebody to turn on a valve, where instead we can just push a button from a control center, then we’ll look for ways to remove that step. But the main thing is having better control of the equipment so we don’t damage it. Automation of facilities is the big technology in this industry, where I think we’re going to see more and more smaller elevators look to automate as it becomes more reasonably priced to do so.
“Of course, we’ll still have employees, but being able to reduce staff by being able to better monitor the equipment from one central location is what I find exciting about it.
“Another thing I’ve seen is that hazardous monitoring systems have improved. The technology and the equipment is better than it used to be, so that’s been a nice improvement. I’m sure it’ll even get better into the future, but that equipment is much better than when it first was introduced.
“Another technology we have employed in the past few years is infrared thermography, where we can check the heat of anything from a bearing to electrical components. That was something that wasn’t even talked about when I first entered the industry.”
Brett Bell
COO | Landus Cooperative
Ames, IA
“Grain Journal did a Facility Feature on our newest grain facility, which was built in 2018 in Collins, IA. That facility has a lot of automation. It’s a 3-million-bushel facility with three scales (two outbound and one inbound), 40,000-bph receiving capacity, and a 7,000-bph dryer. We can run that elevator with one person, who can be in the office grading grain.
“From a technology standpoint, the one thing the industry is still trying to figure out is how to grade grain without human intervention. We haven’t cracked the code on that one yet. But everything else in our Collins facility is run or could be run with automation. However, we don’t run it that way every day of the year. During harvest, we have people man the pits, so our customer doesn’t have to get out of the truck. That actually keeps the flow moving a little quicker.
“But, at the end of the day, the facility is fully automated. We could run it remotely if we wanted to.
“Over time, if you look at the trends, you’ve got bigger, faster farmers and a smaller pool of labor. That’s where the importance of automation comes in. A lot of our facilities are automated in some form or fashion.
“Another big innovation, believe it or not, is cordless tools. That came from one of my teammates who has been doing maintenance for 40 years. He crawls around all of our facilities doing various maintenance and repair, and the ability for him to take cordless tools with him has been pretty profound.
“Near-infrared (NIR) technology also has been influential for us. We’re in the soybean crush business, so oil and protein matter to us. With the utilization of these NIR machines, we can test for oil and then, to the extent it’s possible, we can favor soybeans that have more oil over those that don’t.”
Brad Ortman
VP-Engineering & Operations
Kokomo Grain Co. | Kokomo, IN
“The biggest things I’ve seen for us the past five to 10 years are the PLC systems we have installed. We’ve gone away from hard wires and relay logic. The PLC systems we have presently are so much simpler to use and change, particularly the flow graphics, and you get so much more information from them.
They are also more cost-effective, because you can get away from pulling miles and miles of control wire through your new facility, and in retrofits, the associated maintenance from all of that extra wire. Instead, you just need a computer and a network throughout the facility to tie everything together.
“One thing we’ve been working with for the past three or four years is carbon dioxide monitoring, and we’re finding a lot of benefit from it, particularly in our outside piles. We find problems sooner than we would with temperature cables, and let’s face it, temperature cables are difficult to install in temporary piles.
“Another thing I’m really looking forward to is optical sorting technology that identifies different grains, such as corn and soybeans. The technology is still being perfected, but I can see it being a real benefit just from the standpoint of mixing grain.
“And there’s also some scanning technology out there, which consists of monitors on the side of a bin that can see through the mass of the grain using technology similar to an MRI or CT scan, and it can tell you the temperature, moisture, and if there is insect activity.”
