Floresta 4.0: automação e supervisão do processo de carbonização da madeira

Abstract

The technologies in the current scenario of industries allow to sophisticate the means of production, automate activities, optimize operations and manage resources in decision making. Although the digital age is creating paradigms, one of the existing challenges worldwide is energy consumption to produce. With the overload of the environment, due to the excessive use of non-renewable energy, the negative impacts tend to collapse society. In this context, renewable energy sources stimulate studies to enable their use in the industrial production chain. In Brazil, charcoal has been used to supply the production of the steel sector. However, the means to obtain this raw material are behind time, being usually with the use of rudimentary ovens and control of the manual process of wood carbonization. Given the above, this work aimed to automate the charcoal production process in ovens of the Ovens-Furnace type. To this end, they were developed two low-cost prototypes to remotely control the air intake leak to the carbonization oven. It is used the Python™ programming language and the Raspberry PI and Arduino hardware, with the use of the K-type Thermocouple sensor, being installed on the roof of the oven (Ovens-Furnace model) of the Instituto de Ciências Agrárias ICA-UFMG. After building the components, for flow control and temperature data acquisition, it was carried out the wood charred. Subsequently, a supervision system was developed using the ThingkSpeak™ platform with sharing and storage of data in the cloud, for access to information on the charcoal production process, in real time, and remote control of the activation of the prototypes. Temperature data were submitted to the t-test for data analysis and comparison. They were taken two production samples, being one obtained from charcoal produced in a conventional way and the other from charcoal produced after the implementation of the prototypes. Both were analyzed in relation to apparent relative density, true relative density and porosity parameters, and the results were statistically compared. The analysis of the temperature data showed the superiority of the developed method, which reached certain stages of carbonization in less time, in addition to maintaining a high temperature during the process. The t-test revealed a statistical difference between the parameters of the carbonization temperature samples of each method. With the improvement of the applied technologies it is possible to reach a satisfactory standardization and charcoal yield superior to the conventional methods. The technologies involved promote a rearrangement of the operating dynamics, enabling automatic functions in charcoal production and reducing workers' exposure to occupational hazards involved in the production processes of carbonization.