High-speed dosing station

Esteve has released its fully automatic high-speed metering plant, HSD, for minor and micro ingredients. The HSD is intended for the industrial bakeries that produce a wide variety of recipes from a host of raw materials, in an environment from which contamination is banished.

Typical flows of an HSD system are: five to 10 ingredients per recipe and preparation of 30 to 80 batches/h.

The installation of an HSD system enables tasks that were manual up to installation to be automated. Storage of raw materials, dosage, sifting, automatic conveying of the tubs, and batch identification can all be automated using the system.

The operating principle involves 24 product silos for minor and micro components combined in one system, which can be expanded any time if needed. With this system, up to 80 batches/h, with eight components each, can be fully automatically metered, weighed and provided for processing including liquids such as liquid egg or oil.

The silos are filled 'dust-free' with the components delivered in bags or 'big bags'. For safety reasons, the raw materials pass through a sieve before the storage in the silo. For the metering process, a plastic container moves underneath a hopper into which the different raw materials from the different silos are fed in via dosing screw. A scale underneath the filling station ensures the required precision for the minor components. Micro-components are pre-dosed. Liquid egg or oil is added at the third station. Here, a special tool permits the liquids to be added without contaminating the tubes.

Each container is automatically labelled and the data about its contents is transmitted to the control system for traceability.