Pilot Experiments

NOGAME: Non-destructive gas measuring system for bakery application

   Hungary-Slovenia

  DIH Smart Manufacturing

Experiment objective

NOGAME experiment is a cross-border experiment to increase the uptake of digital solutions at Kanizsa Pékség Zrt. within the consortium made with Pomurje Technology Park as the DIH Smart Manufacturing. NOGAME experiment develops a cost-effective, non-destructive gas energy consumption measuring system for bakery application to enable the company to continuously measure the amount of used gas energy during the production, analyse the consumption, and identify opportunities to optimise opportunities the production.

Challenges

More recently, wholesale prices for electricity and gas are increasing substantially across the European Union, a tremendous burden on food companies. Those sectors are even more affected by the price rise, producing with a high energy need. The bakery is one of these sectors. Natural gas and electricity are the most important energy sources in this sector.

Baking is an energy intensive process. Ovens are at the heart of every baking process and ovens consume massive amounts of energy, meaning that they are a large component of the baking industry cost structure. Replacing older ovens with newer types that are more energy efficient is one cost-reduction strategy.

Currently, the majority of the companies only know the overall gas energy consumption. Still, they have limited information on the performance of their equipment individually. The reason to that lies in the available measuring methods. With individual meters, each equipment’s performance can be monitored, but that is quite an investment. Most bakery companies have multiple numbers of equipment which should be monitored. The cost of individual meters and also to incorporate these meters into the gas pipeline is costly. The pipeline has to be dismantled, and for that, the production has to stop. Bakery production is not a seasonal activity, therefore stopping the production have cost implications.

Implementation Solution

A contactless system will be set up during the experiment by selecting and implementing appropriate tools/sensors to measure the gas energy consumption. These tools/sensors will continuously provide data to monitor the consumption of their equipment and support the management in decision making to reduce costs and achieve their sustainability goals.

The non-destructive measurement system will allow Kanizsa Pékség to collect digital data continuously and to take actions in real-time in case of any discrepancies in the gas energy consumption as it will send warnings in case of such events.

The idea is to measure the gas consumption precisely on the gas supplier’s metering device and using cheap sensors or methods to measure the gas consumption of each heavy user equipment. A machine learning algorithm will be used to identify the equipment’s gas consumption by dividing the metered consumption on the main metering device.

Results Obtained

As the result of the NOGAME experiment, Kanizsa Pékség now has an innovative gas energy measuring system which provides continuous data from each heavy gas energy user. We manage to estimate each user gas energy consumption by monitoring them individually.

Main outcomes include: Reduced gas energy consumption at the Kanizsa Pékség, Optimised bakery production, Cost-effective system implemented, Increased level of digitalization of Kanizsa Pékség, Improved knowledge transfer.

Impact of the experiment

The experiment led to the development of a Gas energy measurement system that monitors the gas energy consumption of each user individually without interfering with the main gas pipeline. The impact is significant as the wholesale price of gas and electricity increased significantly in the last year. This is huge burden to companies. Yet, most of the companies only can measure and monitor the consumption of all users, not the individually. Having individual data enables companies to identify inefficient users, wasteful operations and make data-based decisions.

Dissemination

The NOGAME Consortium members were dedicated disseminating the project in Hungary and in Slovenia as well. The project concept and dissemination tools were presented at the following events:

  • Annual Campden BRI Hungary Open Day (11.11.2021; Budapest, Hungary): This is the Annual event of Campden BRI Hungary where this year 53 participant attended (industry and policy makers mainly).
  • Annual Meeting of the Association of Hungarian Deepfreezeing and Canning Industry (02.12.2021; Kecskemét, Hungary): Annual conference of the representatives of Hungarian frozen vegetables industry (appr. 25 attendees). This sector can be potential user for the NOGAME solution.
  • EIT Regional Executive Academy Innovation Through Cooperation: How to successfully implement the Smart Specialisation Strategy (S3) in Hungary (07.12.2021; online event) to showcase the concept of DIH-World and NOGAME for 24 European participants from various fields.
  • Closing Conference of Industry 4.0 and Robotics Month (21.12.2021; Ljubljana, Slovenia) was a great opportunity to showcase NOGAME in Slovenia.
  • Zöld és Digitális átállás a gyártásban (Green and Digital transition in Manufacturing) (08.04.2022, Székesfehérvár, Hungary). The event is the final event of Bionuss DIH-World experiment and provided a great opportunity to strengthen the collaboration between the two experiments.
  • 17th of April , 2022, an EURADA DGW (Digital Working Group) transnational event in Maribor (hybrid version) will take place, where as a part of Slovenian DIH-WORLD use cases, the NOGAME will be presented (official announcement is in progress and social media reports about the event to happen (PTP, DIH-WORLD, RDA Podravje, DIH2 network,…)
  • 21st of April, Pomurje Technology Park / DIH Smart Manufacturing hosts a national event where all concrete industrial digital transformation experiments/use cases will be presented and also NOGAME project as one of the PTP successful stories (media announcements will follow)

Additionally, different dissemination tools were developed and used: leaflets, a roll-up and a short video (in English; Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZYOLU5JaF4). The social media channels (LinkedIn, websites) of all involved partners were used to disseminate NOGAME.