Abstract

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.