No more moist cooca beans

A warehouse and logistics service company from Hamburg installed with help of E-Senza Technologies a wireless system for continuous temperature and humidity monitoring of its valuable crude materials.

Stored correctly, cocoa beans should have moisture content between 6% and 8%. Higher humidity values can make the cocoa beans mold and ferment. Under worst conditions the beans can get damaged completely. The optimum relative air humidity of the storage is 70% to 75%.
The temperature is not less important as the relative humidity during the storage of the beans. As through high heating it can even self ignite and set the whole warehouse on fire. In addition to the high temperature, the frost can also be a danger for the cocoa beans.
Before installing this automated system, staff of the warehouse had to regularly take manual samples from the cocoa mountains to ensure quality and maintain freshness. The samples had to be evaluated in the lab, which was costly and time consuming.
With the wireless sensor network SenzaNET now several cocoa mountains are automatically monitored. Within such a mountain around nine temperature and humidity sensors were fixed. They feature 30cm and 200cm long rods made of food grade stainless steel. The end of the rods has very special filters to be able to measure the humidity level between the cocoa beans within an extremely dusty environment. Due to the different lengths of rods the parameters are measured simultaneously in the upper and lower part of the cocoa mountain.
The devices are equipped with two large and stable radio antennas that have high range and ensure the use in this harsh environment.
The systems feature a GPRS gateway to bundle and transmit the values of the dual sensors to the company server, located several kilometers away. The wireless gateway provides time synchronization, routing, scheduling services and temporary storage of the measured data.
The wireless monitoring software SenzaWMS helps to centralize the visualization, manage and evaluate the measured values using a user-friendly web interface. The software also monitors critical thresholds and deviations of the system and automatically triggers an alarm.

E-Senza Technologies, located in Constance Germany, is a market leader in low-power, reliable wireless device networking solutions. These solutions are designed for temperature and conditioning monitoring to optimize industrial processes, energy efficiency of data centers & buildings as well as compliance with governmental regulations. E-Senza enables OEMs and end users a fast go-to-market and help deploy standards-based or proprietary wireless monitoring or control solutions. These all result in increased safety, improved quality, and enhanced operation efficiency. E-Senza products and solutions are used by major companies and by system integrators in a variety of industries around the world.
For further information please visit: http://www.e-senza.com

E-Senza Technologies GmbH
Max-Stromeyer-Straße 116•
D-78467 Konstanz • Germany
T +49 7531 36599-10 • F +49 7531 36599-29
info@e-senza.de • www.e-senza.de

This release was published on openPR.