Power-Converter-Enabled Microbrewery

The climate crisis has made cleaner industry processes a necessity. The beer industry relies almost exclusively on fossil fuels to handle their most energy-intensive processes: mashing and boiling. Moreover, most micro breweries use manual or hysteresis control to regulate temperature during this stages, thermally stressing the malt, thus reducing its efficiency. In this context electric breweries, based on solid state relay (SSR), have been proposed to eliminate fossil fuel dependence. However, the direct connection of the heating element to the AC grid, does not solve the malt's thermal stress problem. Moreover, this solution is limited in terms of scalabillity, due to the harmonic content imposed in the grid's current by the hysteresis control of the SSR. This paper proposes a cauer-based thermal model for mashing and boiling during beer fabrication and a power converter configuration for a micro-brewery, where the complete mashing and boiling processes are controlled by a two-converter configuration. The simulation results show a good tracking of the temperature during mashing and boiling and the grid current's grid code compliance.