Substantiation of the dosing module parameters with piston injection for viscous food products

One of the operations in the technological scheme for the portioned food products production is their dosing.The problem of accurate dosing in the food industry is one of the key ones, determining its efficiency, material consumption and compliance with regulatory requirements.The manufacturing lines productivity also significantly depends on the speed of packaging operations in general and dosing in particular.The entire range of food products includes viscous products, the precise dosing of which is an important issue for the confectionery, canning, dairy processing and other industries.The object of research is a semi-automatic volumetric dosing module of piston type with crane valves and pneumatic drive.During the physical experiment, the effect of pressure and the configuration of the outlets on the product dose delivery by the piston dosing module was determined.Six series of experiments were conducted with different nozzles, the experiment in each series was repeated three times.Dosing viscous products with a piston dosing module provides sufficient accuracy and performance.For uniform filling over the entire container area, it is advisable to direct the product through several channels, but this leads to an increase in hydraulic resistance.The most efficient dosing is achieved with the four-hole nozzle with a diameter of 8 mm for larger volumes and the three-hole nozzle with a diameter of 3.6 mm for smaller volumes.The simulation of the process of dosing viscous food products in the SolidWorks Flow Simulation software package was performed for all six nozzle options under consideration and showed similar results to the physical experiments.The parameter that was compared was the product flow rate, m/s.The average product velocity of 1.68 m/s corresponds to the production data within an error of 5.2%.