KHUSHI RAM BEHARI LAL LIMITED (KRBL Ltd.) is India’s first integrated rice company with a comprehensive product chain. The company has spent three generations perfecting the Basmati grain. Adopting traditional knowledge and skills, experience in modern-day crop management practices, commitment to excellence and access to top grade inputs determines the quality of KRBL’s harvest. The result has been equally rewarding, having the largest installed capacity in the industry with quality certifications to ensure satisfaction to both the buyers and the eventual consumers.
KRBL- Dhuri is on the Ludhiana-Delhi highway, India. The plant is completely equipped with state of the art storage technology, holding paddy in 12 flat bottom silos of 3500 metric tons each.
In Feb 2018, KRBL’s centralized technical team got in touch with Grain Technik Pvt. Ltd. for the use of our grain chilling technology. The loading cycle of the silo at site would begin in the month of December and end within February each year. The ambient temperature in summer range would be between 33°C – 48°C. The main risks faced by KRBL would be dry grain during extreme high temperatures if aeration fans are used, along with an increased risk of pests and high temperature related damages as well as high risk of discoloration and cracks. KRBL was especially interested in minimizing the color sorter rejection percentage, as well as broken rice percentage while preserving the aroma of the Basmati rice.
Therefore, Grain Technik Pvt. Ltd. was invited for technical discussions with regards to chilling the paddy stored in silos at the Dhuri site right after February. The requirement was to cool the paddy stored in the 12 3500 metric ton silos within a short period of time achieving low running costs. Considering the grain was stored at 13% moisture content, it was extremely important that no moisture is added to the grain.
GrainTechnik offered its gT-450 to cool the silo size of 3500 metric tons. The unit was installed with a ‘Y’ piece adaptor to feed the chilled air in both double H type aeration channels of the silo. The aeration fan was removed and the fabricated adaptor was installed at site by Grain Technik trained technicians. The unit started on 6th April 2018 and within 12days time was able to bring down the grain temperature from 26°C to 12°C inside the silo with 3000 metric tons of stored paddy. The unit was checked every 3 hours to see whether the set temperature and relative humidty was being delivered. The cold grain was tested for 6 months in weekly intervals, taking samples both from top as well as bottom of the silo. Apart from moisture content and product temperature, the samples were tested for aging, color, aroma and cooking properties. The paddy was milled after the storage period and the results were recorded (know more).
The GT-450 proved to be an efficient tool to bring down the temperature as well as relative humidity to achieve safe storage conditions and met the performance parameters expected by KRBL.
The GT- Grain chiller unit range is suitable for all sizes of grain storage. To know more please visit www.graintechnik.com
