CREMONA, ITALY — Ocrim’s Research & Development group has developed an on-line system: the Multifunction Grain Analyzer (onlineMGA). Upon the recent debut of this technology, the company said that this system was developed to satisfy the milling market’s needs concerning the continuous control and management of the milling process. The main objective, it said, is to combine the management of the grains blending with the conditioning.

Ocrim said that the onlineMGA was designed to improve the quality of the finished product, guarantee the constant time of the flour produced, obtain a higher flexibility of the plant and reduce the maintenance costs. The control, in real time, of the production process is gaining more and more importance. Proteins and moisture are the wheat chemical parameters that are verifiable and manageable during the cleaning and conditioning phases.
When the onlineMGA is installed along the milling line, it is able to measure both proteins and moisture parameters.

Near infrared Spectroscopy provided a base for Ocrim’s development of the reading system on VIS-NIR technology. Ocrim said this method provides better accuracy of the readings and a real-time surveying since it acts directly on water and protein molecules that the wheat contains.

The onlineMGA can be employed in several critical points of the milling process due to the absence of bulky installation structures and thanks to NIR innovative technology connected to an advanced machine control system. Ocrim said that the onlineMGA guarantees high performances that surpass the simple control of the proteins values and moisture management thanks to its combination with the automated management system and through the continuous and constant cereal analysis.

According to Ocrim, the most innovative aspect is the employment of the onlineMGA in the second conditioning. This removes the problem concerning measurements on an already wet product. Ocrim said that a continuous retroactive adjustment can be carried out on the amounts of water added in both dampening phases in order to obtain a percentage of moisture required, constant in time, of the wheat put into the milling process.

The onlineMGA also can be constructively employed during the raw material reception at the plant. Positioned at the reception before storage, the device can measure the percentage of moisture of the whole product  lot, allowing the immediate control and valuation of the incoming grains, the company said.

By means of Ocrim’s @mill management, all the parameters obtained during the various sessions can be recorded and combined with the various lots of operation and storage, providing traceability of the product.

The onlineMGA can measure the protein levels in the grain at the same time the wheat’s moisture is being analyzed. The system of traceability of Ocrim’s @mill allows the combination and archive of the related protein value for each product combined in the lot and operation phase, Ocrim said.