Environmental Monitoring of a Winery Environment

Introduction

As a product of ethanol fermentation, carbon dioxide (CO2) is released from fermentator into the environment. The OSHA permissible exposure limit is 5000 ppm for 8 hours of exposure, approximately 10 times the CO2 content of the atmosphere. For every liter of juice fermentated, approximately 64 liters of pure CO2 is produced. The CO2 in the evnronment of the winery can be controlled in the following ways:

1. Vent CO2 to outside the building
The CO2 can be prevented from entering the indoor environment in the first place and can be collected as it is produced and vented outside the building. While this method will prevent CO2 building inside the building, a better method would be to...
2. Caputure and sequester the CO2
The CO2 produced from wine fermentation is ideal for sequestration as it is a) produced in an enclosed space and thus easy to capture and b) highly pure.
3. Bring in outside air to dilute inside air to safe levels
This is the least ideal solution. Wine fermentation is performed in the hottest months of the year, thus the air being brought inside is warm, and more energy is required to cool the building

Wireless Sensor Network

No matter what methods are taken to mitigate CO2, there is still a need to measure CO2 in the envinronment. Since CO2 is denser than air, a vertial separation will exist, in addition to the inherent varirability in CO2 emission and distrubution across a floorplan. Existing CO2 monitoring devices for wineries typically consist of a single sensor mounted on the wall, providing only a point measurement, however, the spatial dependency of CO2 lends itself to a multi-sensor system. Multiple versions of wireless sensor networks have been developed. A small snapshot of data is shown below (metric names removed). The data demonstrates the variability across a floorplan, with some locations above the 5000 ppm limit and some locations near the outside CO2 level of 420 ppm.

References

N. Madrid, R. Boulton and A. Knoesen, "Remote monitoring of winery and creamery environments with a wireless sensor system", Building and Environment, vol. 119, pp. 128-139, 2017.

J. Nelson et al., "Wireless Sensor Network with Mesh Topology for Carbon Dioxide Monitoring in a Winery," 2021 IEEE Topical Conference on Wireless Sensors and Sensor Networks (WiSNeT), 2021, pp. 30-33, doi: 10.1109/WiSNeT51848.2021.9413797.