HIGHLAND GRAIN

Highland Grains is an agricultural cooperative, owned by its 89 members, which dries, conditions and stores malting barley and other crops. It primarily supplies the Scotch whisky distilling industry, but also exports high quality grain to other countries.

Based just north of Inverness, Highland Grains was founded in 1978 with a capacity to handle 4,400 tonnes of barley a year. Steady expansion has seen its annual throughput grow to over 40,000 tonnes. Today the plant consists of five continuous flow dryers, seven wet and fifteen dry storage silos (ranging from 250 tonnes to 2,300 tonnes) and two warehouse-like flat stores of 7,500 tonnes each. Committed to constant development, the site also includes innovations such as heat recovery on its drying systems, power synchronisation and biomass boilers. 

Since 2012, Coldcurve has worked in close partnership with Highland Grain to develop innovative solutions to maximise efficiency and productivity. Coldcurve continues to provide comprehensive maintenance for the plant 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Over the years we have upgraded:

✔ HMI Systems

✔ Dust Extraction Systems 

✔ Main Extraction Fans

✔ Machine programming

✔ Plant monitoring systems

Most recently, Coldcurve was commissioned to replace the existing, much-extended control system with an efficient state of the art one.

A new Movicon SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) system was installed to consolidate the series of plant upgrades and expansions for the grain drying and storage facility that supplies some of Scotland’s leading distilleries.

The new software provides control and visualisation for product movement, processing and storage, including the integration of biomass boilers and heat recovery systems.

The project was led by Coldcurve engineer, who explains that although the site’s operations are relatively complicated, a simple system architecture was achieved: “Lorries are constantly delivering grain from the growers, while others collect dried malting barley for the distilleries – it’s a 24/7 process at busy times, plus there are several different drying processes. There are also a number of subsidiary processes to control, such as incoming and outgoing weighbridges, boiler operations and heat recovery for energy efficiency.”

The whole site is now controlled from a single, powerful PLC supporting 24 (64bit) digital I/O cards, 4 analogue input I/O cards and 2 regular I/O cards. In addition to this, Coldcurve is future proofing the site by utilising the Mitsubishi Q series PLC ensuring that the control system is modifiable for any future expansion. There are also two PCs and a number of touchscreen HMIs on the system, providing main and secondary control stations. This installation provides constant real-time production process information, collecting data from multiple sensors on the plant and processing it into easily accessible, concise information. This allows Highland Grains to efficiently manage its plant and processes to meet your changing needs.

The new system is based on an XML technology that offers an all-in-one development environment for managing all HMI, SCADA and statistical production data analysis applications. This allowed Highland Grain and Coldcurve to minimise project development times and also to achieve a powerful, open, solution that is easy to maintain and flexible so that it can accommodate future developments. This software also supports web services, scalable vector graphics, OPC, SQL, ODBC, and many other functions that allow highly integrated information and control systems to be developed, whether they be large or small.

Highland Grains has been successful over nearly forty years because of its willingness to adapt to new and changing demands.

Now, with the Scotch whisky industry once again resurgent (it is worth about £5bn to the UK economy and growing at 5% a year according to the Scotch Whisky Association) it is expecting to further develop its site and facilities over the coming years. The simplicity of its control architecture designed and built by Coldcurve along with the flexibility of the Movicon software should make production as straightforward and efficient as possible.