Different levels of automation are currently being used to make industries more competitive. However, methods based purely on industrial automation do not allow complete integration or total production flexibility. Given this, the concept of Industry 4.0 is established as a strategy for building a highly flexible production model for personalized and digital products and services, with real-time interactions between people, products, and devices during the production process. In the Industry 4.0 concept, tasks are carried out based on information from the physical and virtual world. These production systems have highly scalable networked sensors (smart grids) and can generate large amounts of information from the physical world (big data), requiring various means of data collection and analysis (analytics). Industry 4.0 has been treated as the most important technological leap forward today, capable of leading to paradigm shifts, thus emerging as the fourth industrial revolution. This proposal aims to evaluate and introduce Industry 4.0 technologies into the production process at the Yara Brasil plant in the city of Rio Grande, as well as to investigate the use of computer vision algorithms for particle size analysis in applications in the fertilizer industry. The aim is to develop a prototype of a customized granulometer that can be used in the fertilizer production line.

Funded by Yara Brasil Fertilizantes - Cooperation