Brix and Alcohol Content Monitoring using Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

Fermentation process plays an important role in the production of wine and beer, as these ferments convert Brix (sugar) into alcohol. Thus fermentation plays a key role in beer production hence monitoring entire activities is essential to breweries. As such, this project aimed to monitor the by-products of fermentation processes which are Brix (Sugar concentration) and Alcohol in order to improve the Quality of alcohol. Different stages of fermentation produce different Brix and alcohol percentages by volume. A system using wireless communication protocol is proposed where sensor node readings are transferred to a centralized station for monitoring and visualization. The sampling technique used was Non-probability purposive due to the fact that information gathered was important to contribute to better understand the problem by gathering information from the right personnel in the field of study. Through this approach, it is a perfect application of IoT and Wireless Sensor Network solution which has been achieved and provides advantages to the brewery industry. Moreover, the transfer of real-world processes to a digital world has been made possible which allows optimizing these processes.  Through the project study, a simple and automated method with good accuracy was developed for estimating Brix and alcohol content during the fermentation process.