Tag: Baking

Super Air Knife Cleans Baking Pans

Published on by exaircorpLeave a comment

A few weeks back I was contacted by a large baking company who was looking for a better way to pre-clean their cake and muffin pans before sending them to a wash cycle. After the pans exit the oven, an operator places the baked goods on a cooling conveyor then uses an air gun to blow out the residual crumbs. The pans are then placed on a separate conveyor and sent through a washer. The manual operation was taking a lot of extra time which resulted in reduced production.

Muffin Pan

After further discussion, I recommended they use our 24″ Super Air Knife. The Super Air Knife produces an even, high velocity curtain of air across the entire length of the knife which would provide a uniform blowoff of the pans, eliminating the manual cleaning.  Super Air Knives are extremely efficient and quiet. Operating at 80 PSIG, using a 40:1 amplification rate of entrained ambient air to compressed air consumed, they require only 2.9 SCFM per inch of knife length while maintaining a low sound level of only 69 dBA and produce a velocity of 11,800 feet per minute.

Efficient way to clean, dry or cool parts, webs or conveyors.

The Super Air Knives are available in lengths from 3″ up to 108″ in single-piece construction and offered in aluminum, 303ss or 316ss construction, they are the perfect choice for small scale or wide coverage blowoff applications. To discuss a particular application or for help selecting the best EXAIR product to fit your need, contact an application engineer at 800-903-9247.

Justin Nicholl
Application Engineer
justinnicholl@exair.com
@EXAIR_JN

 

Muffins Anyone? photo courtesy of Amy via creative commons license.

How does the Muffin Man lift his Mini Muffin Pans?

Published on by Dave WoernerLeave a comment

This week application is brought to you by the muffin man.  A customer called in this week who was charged with building a small muffin pan lifting system.  The customer, an automation company, was contracted by a bakery to lift individual aluminum baking pans from a stack of pans to load on conveyor where the pan would be filled with batter and baked.  The weight of the pan was around .25 pounds so the weight was minimal, but the mini muffin tins didn’t have a large flat surface for a vacuum cup to lift upon.  The bakery wanted the vacuum frame to lift multiple pans at once to meet there production schedule.

ModularE-VacFamily_jpg

So what makes this system noteworthy?  Normally with vacuum systems, the weight of the unit is most important, but in this case the shape of muffin tin is the limiting factor.  The mini muffins were only .8″ wide at the base, and the cups were less than 1/4″ apart.  Because of this geometry there was only one vacuum cup that could gain a good grip on the muffin tin.  The part number 900766 vacuum cup is a small bellows style cup that is .73 inches.  This small diameter part allowed us to lift on the flat round bottom of the muffin cup.  I advised the customer to use at least (2) vacuum cups on each muffin pan to increase capacity and have some redundancy in the system to lift a pan with every movement of the frame that the automation company would be moving.

If you look at the vacuum cup lifting capacity chart (scroll down the page when it opens), you see that even with (1) 900766 and 15 inches of water column we can lift 6 times the weight of the pan (1.5 pounds), so we don’t need to use a non-porous generator, but can use a porous generator which will still have enough vacuum flow, even if we have an open vacuum cup from a pan that is left behind.

Since he was trying to lift three muffin tins at once,  we used (2) of the model 820003M vacuum generators, and (6) of the 900766 vacuum cup.  Each of the 820003M fed three of the vacuum cups on different pans, so that if one of the vacuum generators has a failure the pans will still be lifted.

Dave Woerner
Application Engineer
davewoerner@exair.com
@EXAIR_DW