Nokia and University of Technology Sydney unveil 5G-connected microbrewery

Declaring a technical world’s first in the estimable pursuit of aiming to produce the perfect pint, Nokia and the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) have announced the successful operation of a private wireless and 5G-connected digital microbrewery (pictured above).

Claiming to have a reptation for “innovative” teaching, UTS regards itself as the top-ranked young university in Australia and has a stated vision to be a leading public university of technology recognised for its global impact. It also has a commitment to practical innovation and research that benefits industry and society, believing in social change to create a more just and equal world.

Located in a growing industrial and technology hub in Botany, just outside Sydney’s central business district, the 9,000m² UTS Tech Lab is designed to facilitate new, integrated ways of researching and developing innovative technologies. It houses a range of interconnected multidisciplinary engineering and IT labs, as well as collaborative workspaces, meeting rooms and seminar spaces, arranged to foster cross-pollination of knowledge and innovation.

It is a space designed to allow expert researchers from across the spectrum of engineering and information technology to collaborate with industry partners on multidisciplinary research with real and sustained impact.

The state-of-the-art facility forms part of UTS’s Industry 4.0 research site and in the new use case will endeavour to enable researchers to perfect the art of brewing in the 21st century using digital automation, using a cloud-based digital twin of an actual brewery to optimise the brewing process.

UTS’s Industry 4.0 Nano-Brewery is part of a Advanced Manufacturing and Industrial Data Science testbed developed at the UTS Tech Lab. The Nano-Brewery forms part of an international production network, with an identical physical twin set up in TU Dortmund University in Germany. The 5G-connected brewery captures and monitors production data at every step of the brewing process and uses this data, together with data from the physical twin in Dortmund and a digital twin in the cloud, to optimise the process.

“Our goal is to promote Industry 4.0 principles to local industry by offering a testbed that gives partners the keys to improve their own manufacturing processes and gain business intelligence,” said professor Jochen Deuse, director of centre for advanced manufacturing at UTS. “Our international collaboration with TU Dortmund and Nokia allows us to globalise the outcomes of our testbed.”

5G connectivity is provided by Nokia’s FastMile 5G Gateways connected to a campus-wide Nokia Digital Automation Cloud 5G Standalone private wireless network. The 5G private wireless network is delivered using multiple Nokia AirScale Indoor Radio (ASiR) small cells positioned throughout the UTS Tech Lab campus. The private wireless 5G network forms part of the on-site Nokia 5G Futures Lab opened in November 2021 and is already being used to support other Industry 4.0 projects within Tech Lab, such as the Australian Government-funded Nokia/UTS 5G Connected Cobots project.

“UTS’s Industry 4.0 facility is an exciting environment for developing and testing new 5G use cases,” said Tommi Uitto, president of mobile networks at Nokia. “In the digital microbrewery, we showcase how 5G private wireless networks and cloud-based technologies help optimise the brewing process and move ever closer to achieving the perfect pint.”