WHAT IS AN EXTRUDER, AND DOES OUR COMPANY NEED ONE?

To understand what an extruder is, we must first know what the process of extrusion is. Extrusion is when a material, usually pellets, dry powder, rubber, plastic, metal bar stock or even food is heated and pushed through a die. A die is essentially a mold that shapes the material as it is forced through the small opening to the other side. It’s one of the most common ways to produce sheets and strips of stock metal, plastic and rubber shapes.

An extruder is simply the machine used to complete the extrusion process. Using a system of barrels and cylinders, the machine heats up the product and propels it through the die to create the desired shape.

WHAT IS AN EXTRUDER USED FOR?

Extruders can be used to create a wide variety of usable products by shaping various materials. For example, our breakfast cereals and pre-formed snacks are often made using food extruders, which use uniform, controlled pressure and temperature to create the near-identical pieces we pour into our bowls each morning.

Pet food and treats are created with food extruders for the same reason — to create a high level of consistency and quality in the meals we feed our furry family members. The Bonnot Company’s food forming extruders can be used as standalone applications or be combined with a cooking extruder for unitized cooking and cooling.

For many industries, catalyst extruder machines are used to create catalysts such as high aluminas, gels, kaolin carriers, molecular sieves and more. Whether your company requires minute pellets, solid rods, unsupported rings or another catalyst configuration, Bonnot has the extruder that can get the job done.

Rubber bales can also be extruded for a variety of purposes. For instance, rubber extruders can create extruded hydrogels, which are used to create everything from contact lenses to replacement cartilage. A rubber extruder from The Bonnot Company can break down the large, tacky bales without the use of talc or special chemicals.

Extrusion equipment is even used to create the materials that keep the air and water in our homes purified. Vacuum extruders, which were originally used in the clay industry to de-air their products, are now used to create activated carbon. The extruder de-airs the carbon to increase its adsorptive properties and prepare it for use for any number of air and water purification applications. Bonnot has worked with virtually every base material available, not just activated carbon, and can use our expertise to demonstrate how this extrusion process could work for you in our test facility.

While these are some of the most common types of extrusion supported by The Bonnot Company, other extrusion equipment manufacturers may specialized in extruders for other materials, such as plastics, clay, aluminum or other metals. For example, plastic extruders can be used to create PVC pipe. As you can see, the types of extrusion equipment and their uses are widely varied.

WILL ANY EXTRUDER DO?

In short, no. First of all, many devices that are technically extruders are meant for individual, personal use and must be operated by hand. Manufacturers, however, will generally require much larger, more sophisticated industrial extruders. It all depends on the scope of your operation and the standards of your industry.

As with any other type of machinery, there are a wide variety of industrial extruders available, and each one is intended for a particular purpose or set of purposes. Some are designed to also serve a specific niche function, such as de-airing a material, de-watering it or pelletizing it.

Capacity is another differentiating factor. For large batches and maximum capacity, a company may need the High Volume Production Extruder (Terrier), for example. Meanwhile, a company that specializes in research and development would probably do well with low-volume Lab Extruders for producing and testing their products in small batches. Another company may need an entirely different solution.

Pasta Machinery

A kitchen utensil, also referred to as a Pasta Rolling Machine, that is used to roll pasta dough into thin sheets of pasta. The Pasta Machine may be a motor driven machine or a hand-cranked machine that rolls out the dough, stretches it and then cuts it to size. Larger Pasta Machines are made to mix and extrude dough that will be formed into shaped pasta, however, those are more common in commercial use. For home use, the hand-crank machine is the most popular unless homemade pasta is an everyday event and there is a need or desire to make the process more efficient by using a machine with a motor.

Most often the Pasta Machine is made of stainless steel which encloses a set of rollers through which the pasta dough is rolled. As it passes through the rollers, the machine flattens or stretches the pasta, depending on the setting selected for the thickness, creating a thin to thick strip of dough to be formed into the pasta desired. The machine may also have attachments for cutting various sizes of pasta strips into noodles, linguine, fettuccine or other pastas of this type.

When adjusting the thickness of the dough as it is rolled, if it is made too thin it will not cook properly and will become mushy instead of delicately textured so it is important to understand the machine processes in order to roll the pasta so it provides the results desired. Pasta machinery provides a means to produce a fresh, superbly textured and exceptionally flavored product once the art of producing pasta is mastered.

Information technology in the management of pasta factory production lines

They don’t do things the way they used to do once… How many times have we heard that. Of course, this sentence cannot be valid for everything, yet in the field of dry pasta industrial production machinery it is not so far from reality. Here are some important considerations taken from a speech by Vittorio Cogo on the italian sector magazine “TECNICA MOLITORIA”.

The technology for the production of dry pasta is increasingly characterized by the automation of process lines. After the drying technologies based on the high and very high temperatures that characterized the 70s and 80s respectively, we moved on to the information technology era that characterizes pasta production technology from the 90s to the present day.

It has definitely replaced all the previous production line management systems within pasta factories, and affirmed the irreplaceable nature of electronic logic supervision, not only in the single machine or on the single pasta production line, but on the entire production activity of the pasta factory, from the storage of the stocks of raw materials to the storage of the final product, from the organization of the types and times of production to the sorting of the packaged and packed product, from the choice of raw materials to the programming of operational departments. This means that this type of management ensures a complete functional interconnection between the various company sectors.

The automatic control system for dry pasta lines and machinery

Entering more specifically in the “automation” topic we can say that an automatic control system is characterized by three basic groups, namely:

group of devices for detecting functional parameters and field control

parameter processing group

supervision system

First group is composed of all the elements that detect the quantities to be controlled, such as: temperature and humidity probes, inductive sensors for controlling movement, inverters for controlling motor speed, microswitches for monitoring the alarm and safety system .

Second group is composed of the PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) system which takes the inputs sent by the instruments in the field, processes them and sends the command outputs to the process. This device consists of an electronic processing unit equipped with a memory and built around a microprocessor.

The supervision system consists of an interface software program that allows the operator to interact in a simple and intuitive way with all the process parameters, monitoring at all times the operation of the entire production chain.

The operator can set all the production parameters simply by recalling from the PLC memory the so-called “recipes”, prepared for each of the various pasta formats foreseen by the production program of the line.

The system will automatically reset the line at each format change, in just a few seconds, thus relieving the technologist from a task as heavy as it is delicate.

In addition, the system will intervene automatically in the event of anomalies detected along the line, independently providing for the various corrections and / or warning the operator of the intervention performed or of the simple detection. In extreme cases the system will block the operation of the component or machine in question, or even of the entire line if the detected anomaly exceeds the safety levels.

Is The Food Produced By The Puffed Food Machinery Healthy?The puffed food machinery is fully automated from batching, extrusion, puffing, molding, sandwiching, cutting, spraying to finished product at one time. The production line has the characteristics of many optional models, flexible equipment configuration, wide range of raw materials, many types of products, and simple operation. Choosing the right configuration can produce sandwich cakes, sandwich rolls, puffed rice crackers, barley, rice crackers, nutritious breakfast, modified starch and other products, which are suitable for various food manufacturers.