Construction And Application Of Automatic System About Key Technologies In Corn Starch Safety Production

Being a large traditional industry, corn starch is highly demanded. In order to ensure thequality and yield of the final products, process parameters should be optimized scientifically. Inmost of the corn starch production enterprises, parameters are mostly determined based onoperators’ experience. As a result, the phenomenon of unstable production, low products yieldand excessive sulfur dioxide residues and energy consumption are very common. There are onlya few large starch production enterprises put the automation renovation into practice in part ofsections, and each process module is relatively independent, but a comprehensive set ofintegrated automation system has not been formed yet. Based on a large corn starch productionenterprise’s automation engineering project in construction, the integrated automation system toregulate process parameters at optimal value was established. Compared to traditional control,the application effect of automatic control is analyzed. The main contents are as following.1. The comprehensive structure of the automatic system was designed. Including theconstruction of the hardware, the collection and storage of data, as well as the monitoringfacilities.2. The parameters of the multiple production section of material handling, steeping,processing and drying four main workshops were optimized. Before the drying stage of the cornstarch, H2O2was used to reduce sulfur dioxide residues. Though the orthogonal experiments, theoptimum conditions were determined. The results showed that the parameters could becontrolled in the reasonable range. In addition, the optimal desulfurization condition was：starchconcentration:30%, H2O2consumption:0.25g/kg, desulfurization time：30min, pH:5.0. Sulfurdioxide residues in starch, which varied from9.93mg/kg to14.12mg/kg, were fully compliedwith national standards.3. The impregnation effect and products yield were analyzed, and the results showed thatwith the automatic system, the impregnation effect could be significantly improved. Afterapplying the automatic control management，starch yield reached to69.38%,8.78%higher thanthat under the traditional control. And the variance maintained at around0.25. The yields ofgerm, protein, dry matters and fiber respectively increased by0.07%,0.52%,0.53%,-0.33%,with the variance of0.19,0.11,0.09,0.24. The yields were maintained at a more stable state.4. According to the analysis of physicochemical properties of starch, we found that thebasic physical and chemical index of the corn starch produced under the condition of automaticcontrol improved significantly, and some were equal to or even superior to these of the quality class edible starch. The change of transparency, solubility and swelling degree, as well as thefreeze-thaw stability were not significant. And the results showed that there were no adverseeffects on Starch properties.5. After the implementation of automatic control,consumption of water, steam, and sulfur,as well as the number of operators in the corn starch plant with the processing capacity of2500t/d, reduced obviously. Compared with the traditional processing， the cost of productionreduced by0.9417million Yuan.