Smart Cooling System for Milk Transportation in Rural Areas

In the dairy industry, road milk tankers transport milk from one location to another. The milk inside the tanker needs to be kept between 3–5 °C to ensure that the quality of milk is always preserved. The tanker needs to be kept running at all time with the case of sufficient energy being continuously supplied to the cooling unit. The source of energy normally used for this application is a typical generator which needs fuel to operate. This is expensive and is not environmentally friendly. To address this problem, generator as a source of energy needs to be replaced by solar energy to lower the costs associated with cooling of the tanker. In this research a small scale solar powered intelligent cooling system was developed. This system was designed to make use of thermoelectric cooler as a viable cooling unit and operating it intelligently with a programmable logic controller. The system was designed in a way that it can also display the volume of milk inside the tanker and the system power consumption.