Although all of projects are unique and custom built to fulfill particular customer requirements, some are more challenging and therefore more interesting. Here are a few of these projects with some of the challenges and solutions:
Weighing Surimi:
Surimi (imitation crab) is difficult to feed as it sticks to surfaces. We combined aspects of manual and automatic feed to devise optimum system for this application. Surface areas were minimized and product was weighed directly into buckets to eliminate possibility of sticking to intermediate weigh buckets. The first system worked so well the customer ordered another one to meet their production demands.
Filling Salads in Bags:
The challenge was to feed over 50 different types of salad products into a bag with high accuracy. Consistency varied from potato salad, with olives and oil, to brussel sprouts and mushrooms. Since there was a lot of moisture and oil in various salads we could not use conventional vibratory feeder for this application. We ended up using a screw conveyor with controls that would allow jogging during dribble cycle yielding accurate bag fill.
Feeding Snack Pellets to Fryer:
The snack pellets were very difficult to handle and they stuck to each other and locked in so that it was challenging to feed them at an accurate rate consistently. We combined belt elevator with our magna Weigh and with several stages were able to successfully de-nest the product and weigh it very accurately into the fryer. Our system consisted of tote dumping, elevating, metering, weighing, and screening. The accuracy of feed and consistency were excellent.
