The Perfect Combination

By Bob Sperber, Contributing Editor

FoodProcessing.com

Computerized combination weighers remain a mainstay, piecing together profits by eliminating product give-away

Related Articles For more information on computerization in food processing plants, please read iPlant The changing fortunes of food manufacturing

A production machine or system sitting on the plant floor can seem so reliable, so second nature, that it can be taken for granted. It’s easy to overlook how it actually solves a problem, or how it might be improved upon to solve future problems. Computerized combination weighers represent such an example. They may seem to be black boxes, calculating massive amounts of product weights and popping out perfect packages.

Simply defined, a combination weigher is a machine with several hoppers (or buckets or heads) that hold a known portion of the finished product. They discharged their contents into a final package in just the right combination to provide a desired net weight.

Aside from incremental advances in sanitary quick-disconnects, actuators, stepper motors and microprocessors, these machines’ basic technology hasn’t changed since the early 1980s, when they bowed in the marketplace. But there are still many smaller plants that use labor-intensive manual operations or even automated volumetric or net-weight systems that the larger food processors have left behind.

“Before combination weighers, volumetric or single-fill type machinery would stop filling when it got up to just under the right weight — that’s when you stopped feeding,” says Steve Bergholt, chief engineer for Triangle Package Machinery Co., Chicago. “You just had to hope it filled up to the right weight.”

For packages consisting of pieces this was a slow and inaccurate solution, and prone to lost profits due to product give-away. Consider how eight 2-oz. drumsticks can complete a 16-oz. tray pack, but if one is a fraction underweight, it will take a whole, ninth drumstick to complete the package.

In contrast, combination weighers combine, for example, heavy and light drumsticks, or any product that’s packaged in pieces. While the technology is well established, it still takes some specialized knowledge and expertise to ensure that the product is gently and efficiently guided through infeed, weighting and discharge sections.

Versatile configurations

 

The possibilities for engineering a weighing solution are nearly endless. There’s no single solution for a single application, such as filling the multiple sections in a prepared “TV dinner”-type meal.

“This can be done in a few different ways, starting with a multi-product, multi-outlet type of configuration,” says Brian Barr, sales manager for Heat and Control Inc.’s packaging systems division, Hayward, Calif., which includes the Ishida combination weigher line. For example, buckets and discharges can be divided into two or three sections, so one machine can fill a separate protein, vegetable and starch into a single tray.

In addition to weighing a single product, combination scales like this Ishida model can blend and weigh multiple products.

Barr says this may or may not be the desired configuration, depending upon a customer’s line and speed requirements, because three weighers can also be used in a “single product, single outlet” mode, one for each meal component, for higher throughput. Additionally, he explains, a “multi-product, single outlet” configuration is typically the choice for blending products, where the net package is a mixture, such as mixed nuts. The buckets do the weighing for multiple types of nuts, and the mixing occurs at the discharge. 

Multiple discharges are one of food processors’ favorite tricks, says Triangle’s Bergholt. “You can take four of your 18 buckets that have known weights in them, and use those four to make up a good package. And out of the remaining 14, you have the machine pick another good combination from four different buckets at the same time. That way you can make discharges twice as fast as you have to weigh and refill those buckets.”

The combinations are seemingly endless, if not infinite. On a machine with six weigh buckets above combining into 12 chambers below, there are a mere 4,096 possible combinations. Compared that to one with nine weigh buckets above feeding 18 chambers, which has a quarter-million possible combinations, according to Bergholt.

“More combinations usually translate into a better chance of achieving the perfect package weight,” he says, regardless of whether the design is radial or in-line. Of course, every application is unique to the food product, plant and business objectives of the company running it.

Broad applications

 

Applications vary as widely as the mathematical combinations behind those buckets. Anything weighed and packaged in pieces seems to be fair game: fruits and vegetables; snack seeds, nuts and chips; candy and candy bars; cereals from bagged rice and grains; and wet, sticky meats and poultry.