Food Dough Cutting Apparatus with Dynamic Width Adjustment
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Existing methods for cutting band-shaped food dough into strips result in varying widths, leading to inconsistent weight distribution and uneven cutting frequencies, causing productivity issues and quality instability due to unnecessary dough discard or backup in secondary formation processes.
Innovation Solution
A cutting method and device that uses a conveyor system with a width detection device and control unit to align and cut the dough into uniform strips, adjusting the cutting interval and position based on the dough's varying width and cut length ratios to ensure consistent weight and cutting frequency across all strips.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If band shaped food dough with varying width is divided into multiple strips using conventional cutting methods, then the cutting process is simple and fast, but the strip widths become inconsistent leading to weight variation and quality instability
Solution Approach 1:
The cutting apparatus employs a movable support that can shift the cutting member position in the width direction based on detected dough width variations. This dynamic adjustment allows the cutting member to maintain consistent strip widths even when the dough width varies, resolving the contradiction between fast cutting and precision cutting.
Solution Approach 2:
The system uses a width detection device to continuously monitor the dough width and provides feedback to the control device. The control device then adjusts the support position accordingly, creating a closed-loop control system that ensures consistent strip widths while maintaining high cutting speed.
2Productivity
If strips with varying widths are produced, then cutting operation is quick, but productivity drops due to discarding unnecessary dough on both sides
Solution Approach 1:
By dynamically adjusting the cutting member position based on real-time width detection, the system maximizes the usable portion of each dough strip. This ensures that strips with varying widths are optimized to produce the maximum number of usable pieces, reducing dough discard and improving effective yield.
3Productivity
If strips with varying widths are produced, then cutting operation is quick, but quality becomes unstable when strips are combined and remixed
Solution Approach 1:
The dynamic position adjustment of the cutting member ensures that all strips are cut to consistent widths despite variations in the original dough width. This uniformity in strip dimensions maintains consistent dough composition and quality when strips are combined and remixed, while still allowing fast processing.
4Device complexity
If the dough width constantly varies, then simple cutting methods can be used, but large differences occur in weight conveyed per unit time and number of cuts per strip
Solution Approach 1:
The system introduces a movable support that dynamically adjusts the cutting member position based on detected dough width variations. This maintains relatively consistent strip widths and weights conveyed per unit time, preventing large fluctuations that would occur with fixed cutting positions.
Solution Approach 2:
The width detection device and control device create a feedback loop that continuously monitors and adjusts the cutting position. This ensures consistent strip dimensions and weight conveyance rates despite varying dough width, while keeping the adjustment mechanism relatively simple.
Data Source
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
AI summary
The invention provides a food dough cutting method and a cutting device (1), capable of forming conveyed food dough strips (F1-F4) that have nearly identical weight per unit time when dividing band shaped food dough (F) into multiple food dough strips in the conveyance direction (S), and is further capable of performing the same number of cuts for each food dough strip when cutting each food dough strip along the width direction into food dough pieces having a specified weight. The conveyed food dough is aligned to a position that is displaced by just an alignment displacement amount with respect to a reference position that is based on the installation position of cutting members (5). The alignment displacement amount is calculated based on the ratio of the width dimension of the food dough and the lengths (L1-L4) of food dough pieces (f1-f4) that are cut from food dough strips on both sides.