Equipamento para medição de temperatura e distância baseada em fotografia para quantificação do volume em resfriadores de leite

Abstract

Milk production has increased in recent years, and combining that with the emergence of stricter standards, this productive sector develops a need to integrate new technologies in order to increase efficiency, safety and quality in production and shipping of the product. The collection of milk from producers to be transported to a dairy is a critical point in the production chain, comprising several steps, such as physical­chemical analysis, alizarol testing, measurement of the volume and temperature of stored milk, among others. The collection on the producer's property is carried out by a truck driver, who is an employee of a transport company, so the process is susceptible to human error and even fraud. To make the process more accurate, efficient, less intrusive and less susceptible to these errors, this project aims to create a way to collect the milk temperature from a distance, avoiding contamination and creating a way to compare with existing systems, and measure the level based on digital imaging and image processing. The developed system allows the user to send commands to the meter equipment, through an Android application with Bluetooth communication. The equipment provides temperature measurements and the capture of the image to be processed. For distance measurement the project employs 4 measuring LEDs, categorized into two types, reference, which have no inclination, and measurement, which have a slope of 30º between each other. To perform tests of this new method, a test structure was developed, in which the equipment was fixed, and collected measurements at different heights. From the results obtained, both in temperature and distance tests, it was possible to observe that the behaviors of errors have a nonlinear character, and that after adjustments using 2nd degree polynomial regression, the system began to present satisfactory results within the range of values that were adjusted.