Programmable Low Cost Embedded Controller for Controlled Atmosphere Storage Applications

Kumar, S and Pandey, A and Sinha, A and Nikhara, S and Sadistap, SS (2010) Programmable Low Cost Embedded Controller for Controlled Atmosphere Storage Applications. In: International Conference on Emerging Trends in Engineering & Technology (IETET -2010), October 14-16, 2010, Geeta Institute of Management & Technology, Kurukshetra (Haryana). (Submitted)

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Abstract

Indian agricultural scientists have immensely contributed to innovation in agriculture in the disciplines of nutrition, breeding, genetic engineering, disease control, weed and pest eradication. This has made India self-sufficient in food grain production. The population of India has touched one billion and the need of hour is more food grain production. This can be achieved by introducing state of the art electronic technologies in agriculture production and processing. It is an universal fact, that losses are one of the main contributor for depleting the yield of any process. Agriculture is not an exception. The loss starts from harvesting, storage, distribution and consumption. Among these, losses during storage of food grains amounts to 10%. In India, the losses without storage amounts to some thousands of Crores/year. Food storage also serves to protect against such occurrences such as food shortages, natural disasters, unemployment, strikes, civil unrest, breakdown of food production and distribution etc. .During the last few decades, there has been an explosive growth in the market for the fresh fruit and vegetable products with prolonged shelf life. The main driving force for this market growth is the increasing consumer demand for fresh, healthy, convenient and additive fresh product items. However, fresh prepared produce items are highly perishable and prone to the major spoilage mechanisms of enzymatic disclosation, moisture loss and microbial growth. In order to meet these challenges, Government of India Planning Commission has funded CSIR to develop appropriate technologies for food storage. Under this funding CEERI, Pilani (India) developed an Industrial Personal Computer (PC) based control system for controlling the process operations of Controlled atmosphere storage (CAS) house and it was sucessefully tested at CSIO Chandigarh. This is a multi-Institutional project involving CSIO Chandigarh, CFTRI Mysore and CEERI Pilani. Main objective of the project was to increase the shelf-life of the fruits under store and maintaining the quality. Initial aim was to quickly develop the system in-order to prove and demonstrate the controlled atmosphere technology to users. Now, the participating Institutions are concentrating on cost reduction of the system. The advantages of the embedded system are well documented. CEERI has taken up the task of developing an embedded controller as a replacement to the present PC based controller. The present paper dwells initially on the features of the PC based controller and then on the salient features of the embedded controller. The Embedded system uses powerful RISC processor PIC18F452. The system utilizes four programmable keys for configuring the system. Mass storage is achieved by interfacing Multi-Media Card by implementing FAT16.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Subjects:	?? TK ?? Electronic Systems > Agrielctronics
Divisions:	Electronic Systems
Depositing User:	Mr. Rabin Chatterjee
Date Deposited:	23 May 2013 05:15
Last Modified:	23 May 2013 05:15
URI:	http://ceeri.csircentral.net/id/eprint/101

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