Motion Controller Reduces Scrap Dough

Some dough is tricky to handle and contributes to the number of mistakes and excess scrap in food processing applications. In order to eliminate this scrap dough on a hearth bread and roll processing line, Pepperidge Farm's Lakeland, FL plant switched to Baldor's (Forts Smith, AR) SmartMove motion controller.

Photoelectric eyes were previously used to detect if dough balls were off-line and causing problems in the conveyor process. The problem with this technique was that even slightly off-line dough could continue down the conveyor. This would end up being stretched and cut into unacceptable shapes, creating the excess scrap.

This is exactly why the Optimised Control's integrated motion controller, SmartMove, was chosen for this application. Its built-in analog I/O and its MINT programming language allows clear, high-level commands to be used. At Pepperidge Farm, a 100-line program is loaded into SmartMove's non-volatile memory to automatically correct dough position on a short conveyor section before it reaches the stretcher board. This program detects the width of the dough ball as it passes the beam array, then uses MINT's math capability to compute any necessary correction, and move the servo-driven cylinder.

Baldor's simple operator panel is connected to the SmartMove to provide some basic controls over the process, and to display error messages. With the built-in operator interface keywords in the MINT language, this is implemented using just 20 lines of code.

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For more information, contact Baldor Electric Co.,5711 R.S. Boreham, Jr. St., Fort Smith, AR 72901. 501-646-4711.

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