Telegesis selected for EU funded project

Date: 19/12/2011

Telegesis has been selected to provide ZigBee radio expertise into an EU funded project to improve product quality and production techniques in the €1 billion European dry cured meat industry.

The project – which is being supervised by CRIC (Research & Innovation Institute of Catalonia) - features a team of experts from the sausage production industry together with expertise from private companies and  the Universities of Parma and Barcelona. Called DryCheck – the aim of the enterprise is to create a new technology to improve the drying process of sausages. Currently up to 10% of dry cured sausages are either very low quality or unfit for sale. The new technology aims to significantly reduce this wastage by helping the meat producers to guarantee a high quality product by measuring the quantity of moisture in the meat in real time whilst simultaneously maintaining traditional flavours and texture.

System architecture and targets include:

· Design of a fully integrated node featuring a multi-electrode Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) system compatible to different sausages (geometries, materials, biocompatibility and mechanical stability) along with robust, low consumption and low drift weight, temperature and Relative Humidity sensors.

· Implementation of wireless communication units in each node, based on ZigBee technology, that will manage the information obtained from the multi-sensor system.

· Develoment of a closed-loop software control strategy capable of enabling automatic corrective actions (applying new T and RH set points) in the drying chamber (air heating and flow injection) from the analysis of signals from the multisensor nodes.

It is intended to demonstrate the functionality of the DRYCHECK system under real industrial conditions, and show measurable increases in meat and sausage production quality within two years.

www.drycheck.eu