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Recipe Blender System
Triangle’s “spout oval” recipe blending system produces 120 bags per minute with a guarantee that each bag contains every ingredient at a pre-determined weight. Unmatched accuracies are as exact as they can be, hovering right around less than a fraction of an ounce. That’s a daunting task considering that the system blends 6 individual ingredients ranging from large pieces of protein down to small pieces of vegetables.
Each ingredient is weighed via its own in-line combination weigher. Several buckets ride along a track (spout oval) suspended underneath the series of weighers. As a bucket or collecting chamber passes underneath the weigher’s discharge hopper, the individual ingredient is discharged into the chamber. It goes on to receive the next ingredient, then the next and so on down the line. Once the traveling chamber has all required ingredients, it ultimately deposits the blended recipe into a vertical-form-fill-seal bag machine. Should the traveling chamber miss an ingredient, it continues to travel around the track until it receives the needed ingredient, before dumping into the bag machine.
The system’s non-proprietary ControlLogix platform from Rockwell Automation provides comprehensive system performance data which is collected for each component. In other words, at any point in time, through the system’s control panel, an operator can see exactly which ingredients are in each traveling bucket at any point in time. He or she can also check the accuracies of each of the individual products in a particular bucket at any point in the operation. ControlLogix makes the system very operator-friendly, allowing a single point of system control via the spout oval human machine interface (HMI). |
