Research And Design On Automatic Multi-function Food Mixer

Food industry is human’s vital industry, its production value next to mechanical industry and textile industry in China. The development of food industry is complementary to that of food machinery; at the same time, the development and modernization of food machinery restrict the modernization level of food industry. The production requirement of the traditional typical food industry promotes the development of new-type food machinery. Stirring and mixing as an essential part in food processing technology, affect the taste of food greatly.At present, only the parts of stirring and mixing realize automation in food mixers and the rest are manual or semi-automatic, under the present conditions, the production efficiency is very low. In this paper, lots of research based on the existing food mixers, the level of food mixers’automation has been improved, certainly, the new type has a better automatic level and higher production efficiency. This paper includes the following aspects:(1) With conveyor belt, surge bin, weighing sensor and so on, the system design about the feeding of main material is completed. The system about the feeding of main material has implemented the automation of feeding and weighing, shortened curtail production cycle, increase productivity.(2) With the feeding device of powder, oil and acid reagent, the system design about the feeding of excipient has completed. It has achieved the automation of excipient’s weighing and feeding, and the production cost will be decreased. The feeding device of powder adopting screw conveyor and accumulative batcher as its core component is used to implement the storage, automatic weighing and feeding of powder; the feeding device of oil adopting oil drum, pump, turbine flowmeter and solenoid valve as its core component is used to implement the storage, automatic weighing and feeding of oil; the feeding device of acid reagent adopting check valve as its core component is used to implement the automatic spraying of acid reagent.(3) In accordance with the problem of automatic discharging for the food mixing machine mixed, a double swing-rod mechanism which is driven by hydraulic energy is presented. In order to obtain the scale of hydraulic piston-rod, motion kinematics analysis has been carried out on the stroke of short swing-rod as the original mover by Matlab software. Based on the mathematical model established by Creo, the shorter stem position, velocity and acceleration variation law has been obtained by motion simulation of virtual prototype of the original mover by Adams.(4) The automatic control of food mixer for mixing is completed on the basis of PLC and touch screen. The sensor signal is collected through PLC to control the operation of automatic multi-function food mixer, and human-computer interaction is achieved with the weighing data displayed on the touch-screen operator.In this paper, theoretical basis will be put forward for the automation and multi-function of food mixers and an effective method is to improve the efficiency and automatic level of food mixers.