Reconfigurable Partial Power Converter for Beer Brewing Applications

The defossilization of industrial processes is currently one of the main efforts at stopping the climate crisis. In particular, the beer industry has been looking at electrifying its heat-dependent processes to reduce its carbon footprint. Yet, current solutions are typically tailored for large-scale breweries leaving microbreweries, due to a larger relative cost, to use gas as primary resource, which makes it difficult to control the process temperature. To ensure a fine temperature control, thus avoid malt’s stress, a dc-powered heating element can be used. Yet, the cost of this solution is still not suitable for microbreweries. In this paper, we propose the use of a reconfigurable partial-power converter that allows to increase the overall power rating while maximizing its efficiency, together with a full-bridge rectifier that controls the dc-link voltage and ensures low harmonic-content. The simulation results show that the control scheme is capable of reconfiguring the partial-power converter to seamlessly transition between a flyback mode to a step-down partial-power converter mode only when full heating power is needed, thus allowing to shrink the cost of the overall system.