Desenvolvimento de sistema de supervisão e controle de uma planta de produção de cachaça tradicional: inovação e multidisciplinaridade na abordagem de identificação e controle de processos

The work presents a control and supervision system especially designed for a pilot plant of the traditional cachaça production. This plant is designed to develop multidisciplinary research aimed at improving the distillate beverage in copper still by understanding the dynamics of the biochemical and physical phenomena. The real-time acquisition of the input and the output data of the fermentation and distillation processes is carried out by an embedded platform based on available microcontrollers. These data are made available via USB communication network to a friendly data acquisition interface that can be used to develop process models, to execute simulations and to design controllers. From the point of view of research and teaching, the use of the system during normal operation of the plant allows the use of modelling and identification techniques to study the slow and fast dynamics exhibited by the processes of fermentation and distillation as well as the nonlinearities typical of such processes. In addition to that, actual instrumentation and control problems inherent to these processes are investigated via the control and supervision system. Finally, identification tests and modelling techniques applied to a real plant are shown and discussed in a multidisciplinary approach