Beer Brewing Plant

Altenhofer Daniel
5AHMBA

Fischer Manuel
5AHMBA

Lauß Hannes
5AHMBA

Pröll Emil Frederick
5AHMBA

Bernhard Steffen

Brandl Rudolf

Individualisation and mobility becomes more and more important nowadays. The personal beer which fits exactly your taste is getting popular, so that many people try to create a beer themselves with low effort. Especially in our technical education in the department of automation engineering it is essential to think laterally to gain new ideas and solutions.

Another fact is that the limit of the herbicide glyphosate, which will probably be declared as carcinogenic, is too high in nearly every standard beer. As in many newspapers recently reported, the European Union permitted the use for another five years. [1] This is why our teacher Mr. Ing. Rudolf Brandl assigned us to create a brewery system which is easy to operate and where he is able to produce organic beer to avoid this herbicide.

Our task was to plan, design and build a mobile beer brewing plant for an amount of 80 litres. The user-friendly system should operate to a great extent automatically and can be operated by a person without detailed knowledge. Food suitability must be guaranteed for all components in the brewing plant. To control the temperatures, heating and other procedures we use a PLC from Beckhoff. The brewing process should be shown on a visualisation.

To get an insight in the brewing process we met some hobby brewers to figure out what the most important things are in beer brewing. We are very thankful for all the useful tips and the gained experience. Especially we would like to thank Franz Lauß and Olaf Bernhard, who have provided us with their brewing documents and experience. With the gained knowledge we figured out our concept, which is explained in detail in chapter 3. After two months of concept development we agreed on the present result. Then we started to design the parts in our CAD program, Solid Edge. Many modifications had to be made in cooperation with Mr. Ing. Brandl to achieve an optimized brewing plant. As all the parts were put together in an assembly the construction was confirmed in 3D by Mr. Brandl and Mr. Bernhard. Then we immediately started to create 2D drawings for the workshop so that we were able start the manufacturing process.

Many components could be produced in our internal school workshop. The remaining parts, which could not be manufactured, were ordered from several companies. To assemble all the parts, a lot of welding work had to be done. Therefore, we are very thankful to Mr. Leitner who often provided his welding skills for the difficult process of stainless steel welding. After most of the mechanical parts had been assembled, the switchbox was wired and we started to program the PLC. A challenge was to control and hold the temperatures. You can read in chapter 6.4, how we solved this challenge.

The last part was a lot of testing for the fine adjustment. With the gained experience we could correct the remaining errors and an ideal result was achieved.