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| Solenoids in Food Packaging |
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How do you guarantee that the packaging and weight selection system for sticky, stringy, bulky, frozen or fragile products never dispenses under or overweight lots? When packing frozen vegetables, french fries, shredded cheese, snacks, breakfast foods, dog food, shrimp, chicken parts, candy and nuts into plastic bags or other types of containers for the general consumer market, it is very important that the material dispensed into each bag or container is not less than the weight printed on the label. Underweight items can lead to unhappy consumers, and potentially, to dissatisfied distributors, such as grocery chains. It is also important that the bag or container is not overweight, causing "giveaways"-the industry's name for providing more product than the customer is charged for, which can severely lower profits over several million bags or containers.
To prevent under and overweight packages, the weight system must be continuously monitored and calibrated. By doing this automatically every minute, giveaways are kept to less than 1 gram per pound.
An automatic calibration system compares the output from the weight cells under the weight bins to a known weight. The known weight is a calibrated piece of brass much like those in a laboratory weight set. During the calibration of a weight cell, the known brass weight is lowered onto the cell by a Soft Shiftâ solenoid. It is then raised after the comparison and any necessary calibration is completed.
The Soft Shift solenoid was chosen for this application because its stroke and speed of operation can be controlled. The Soft Shift solenoid is used to gently lower the known weight onto the sensitive weight cell without the plunger and shaft weight affecting the weight of the known brass weight.
The Soft Shift solenoid provides an effective and economical solution to the raising and lowering of the known brass weight on the weight cell without damaging or affecting the output characteristics of the weight cell.
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