Automated Management of Food Grain Warehouse Condition

Abstract

The safety food storage is a significant issue concerning people’s living quality and national quality development. In India, nearly 20% of food grains are going as waste due to storage losses. The food storage losses are accounted mainly due to the changing environmental conditions and improper infrastructure facilities. This project proposes an integrated system to monitor and control the environmental facilities like temperature, humidity and light illumination of food depots using wireless sensor network. The food products chosen are Rice and Wheat. The available method for food storage is cold storage. The problem with this method is its cost and consume more power. This project is intended to maintain the environment conditions inside the warehouse and its cost is also less and energy efficient. The wireless sensor networks are nowadays getting upper hand in the sector of control and monitoring applications where human interplay is really impossible or not feasible. In that way, wireless sensor networks could be used for monitoring and control of environment conditions inside the food storage warehouse. The NodeMCU model has been used to collect environment data from DHT22 sensor nodes inside the warehouse and monitored using the Arduino IDE software. The environment conditions are maintained for the respective food product. An automated aeration control strategy is used to provide aeration inside the warehouse to maintain the environmental conditions to ensuring the food security. This project can be further improved by using thermal image sensor for detecting the pests inside the warehouse and detects the object in the night vision also based on the infrared emissions emitted by the objects. Arduino programming can be used for determining the pests which have better accuracy and has less computational cost.