Abstract

Food security is the aspiration of every nation. To achieve this, particularly in Developing Countries, there is a need to reduce wastage by storing staple foods grains beyond their production seasons. Longer storage requires human presence, monitoring and control of the storage environment which may be laborious, demanding and sometimes outrightly unsafe. Therefore, the needs to employ automation and artificial intelligence become necessary to control this storage environment. This study developed an automated, intelligent silo bin that controls the storage environment of the system for the small-scale rural farmers, of which over 70% of their population still depend on agriculture, using Internet of Things (IoT). The developed system consists of three units interfaced together. These units are the pro-type 2-ton (2,000 kg) silo structure, the embedded system (made up of the microcontroller, sensors and relays). The system is integrated to an IoT system (made up of mobile application (BLYNK), Wi-Fi module and ultrasonic atomizer) and the air blowing system (consisting of blower fan and heater). The developed smart system was tested and the test run results showed that it successfully monitors and controls storage air temperature, humidity, air pressure, grain moisture, insect infestation and CO2 levels, the key parameters for long term storability of grains. The coding process could be set to suit different grains and storage conditions required for their effective storage. Although the silo bin structure used for testing was for a particular proto-type, it can be geometrically scaled for many silo  structures.

Keywords: Smart silo, IoT, Artificial intelligence, Embedded system, Ultrasonic atomizer, Controlled environment