World Grain - October 2019 - 46

GRAIN OPERATIONS

Grain elevator of the

FUTURE

Wireless monitoring will play a big role in managing stored grain quality
by Dirk Maier

The availability of more powerful information and communication technology (ICT) is not limited to high income countries. As I complete this article, I sit in a motel in rural southHUQ7DQ]DQLD,WWRRNPH¿YHÀLJKWVVLQFHOHDYLQJ,RZDWRJHW
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access to cellphone service, data and internet.
The speed of data here is 3G as it sadly still is in parts of rural Iowa, U.S. 3G is too slow for autonomous vehicle technology, which requires a minimum of 4G and ideally 5G in order
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faster than today's 4G networks. It will enable and operationalize innovations such as driverless vehicles, drone-operated
farming, robot-run factories, and remote surgery.
According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, by the end
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coverage to begin turbocharging its industries. 5G networks
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based data collection, analysis and decision support. This is
especially important when it comes to real-time analyzing
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systems would generate.
5G means any machine, controller, switch, sensor and
camera could be monitored and activated remotely as instantly as if the decision was made locally (e.g., by a miFURSURFHVVRURUDSHUVRQEXWZLWKWKHYDOXHGDGGHGEHQH¿W
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This potential makes the advent of wireless monitoring and
managing of stored grain quality in our industry a reality -
and preparing for it now, a necessity - beyond anything we
may have imagined in the past.
46

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and autonomous vehicles and transportation. We made the
point that grain receiving, sampling, grading, and subsequent
transfer to wet holding, drying and storage will have to become faster and more autonomous to keep up with farmers and
avoid losing their business to a competitor down the road who
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grain receiving, sampling, and grading will be able to accomplish that with better and faster measurement equipment such
as NIR composition detectors, and with smarter equipment
maintenance. This article focuses on real-time wireless monitoring and managing of stored grain quality. Future articles
will focus on real-time tracking of inventory, lights out and
hygienic operations, and digital services.
WIRELESS SENSOR SAFETY CONCERNS
During the past couple of years, several new companies have
emerged as leaders in monitoring and managing stored grain
conditions remotely with wireless sensors and networks of
sensors. Wireless sensors that can be probed into the grain
mass and monitor temperature and relative humidity (and
convert those values to moisture content via the equilibrium
moisture content relationship) from the grain surface can easily communicate with nearby antennas that pick up the signals, aggregate the data and send it into the cloud from where
actionable alerts are sent back to operations managers.
However, the concern of having to probe such wireless sensors into the grain mass (and recover them) is the need to walk
on the grain surface to do so. This can be dangerous and should
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the headspace of a bin, silo, tank and warehouse above a grain
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These policies prevent probing wireless sensors into a grain
mass and renders the technology useless for its intended application.
Walking on the surface of an outside grain pile, whether
tarped or not, also has its dangers and is therefore not advisOctober 2019 / World Grain / www.World-Grain.com
http://www.World-Grain.com
World Grain - October 2019

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