Company: Bühler Aeroglide

Website: www.buhlergroup.com

Equipment Snapshot: With Tubex Pro, Bühler is launching the next generation of scales. Tubex Pro builds on more than 100 years of Bühler intellectual property, and brings weighing to the next level, using advanced connectivity and digital applications.

“Our Tubex scales are groundbreaking thanks to measuring and control algorithms, and connectivity features. With Tubex Pro, we have made the next step in advanced connectivity,” says Matt Kelly, managing director digital technologies at Bühler. In 2017, Bühler introduced the first Tubex. It processes three times more measurements than conventional scales. With its electromechanical drive system, rather than standard pneumatic cylinders, the Tubex has saved its customers up to 95 percent of energy for the last two years. A traditional scale can easily consume up to USD 10,000 of energy a year. The electromechanical drive also enables much more precise motion and position control. An integrated diagnostic system helps to detect and repair problems. The scale has a hygienic design, and drive components are wear free, which substantially lowers maintenance costs. In the two years that Tubex has been on the market, Bühler has carefully gathered customer feedback and made many upgrades – all of this learning is incorporated in the new Tubex Pro. “Tubex Pro is unique in terms of all of its functionalities and technologies. It contains over 100 years of our weighing experience and intellectual property, and with the next generation of measurement technology and self-monitoring, it reaches accuracy and precision levels that were unthinkable until recently,” says Stefan Birrer, Bühler’s head of milling solutions.

Building on these advantages, Tubex Pro is now taking digital connectivity and plant control to a new level. Now it is even easier to integrate the scale into plant control systems. It is also simpler to transfer its data into cloud applications in order to analyze and visualize data for better yield management, predictive maintenance, or to support customers remotely through Bühler’s global service network. Tubex Pro will be connected to the Bühler Insights IoT platform powered by Microsoft Azure. It is designed to make it easy for food and feed processors to collect and analyze key production data such as yields, or to trace and track products, and raw materials.

One example of the new digital applications is the Bühler Yield Management System, a cloud-based monitoring solution that provides remote oversight of production data. It visualizes and compares deviations from recipes. With it, customers can monitor and benchmark their production sites. The digital yield management system is one of the first of its kind and works together with Tubex Pro via Bühler Insights to increase production efficiency and yield.

Bühler is at the forefront of digital technology in the food and feed industry, which will revolutionize how mills and plants are run in the future. “So far, we have optimized components or subsystems. Now, with devices such as Tubex Pro, entire systems such as milling plants become transparent, comparable, and can constantly be digitally optimized. We can simply connect devices via plug and play to reach a new level of efficiency and food safety,” says Matt Kelly.

This will help millers and other food processors to stay competitive in a fast-changing environment. “Competition and issues like food safety are becoming more demanding,” says Birrer. “To be successful, you have to be very efficient and very flexible. Product recalls and contamination have made customers feel insecure. So, the need for food safety and traceability has dramatically increased. With digital applications, services and technologies such as blockchain we can achieve breakthroughs and meet these challenges,” he adds.

While Tubex is fully available on the market, Tubex Pro will be on sale starting in the second half of 2019. Retrofits will also be available to upgrade Tubex to Tubex Pro.

For more information on Bühler’s digital solutions, please visit: https://digital.buhlergroup.com