INDUSTRY: FOODS, CHEESE DAIRY

Needs

The dairy had a need to better control the dosage of cheese during production.  As the customer wished a uniform end product, better control with the dosage would mean a lesser waste of cheese.  The cheese en poured into trays of known dimensions and thereby the immediate volume of cheese be determined if it were possible to measure the height of the cheese.  In stead of manual measurements being taken, a more uniform automated measuring was wanted.

As other factors play a role in the final volume after ended production it was a wish to save the measurements for later statistical purposes, comparing the cheeses actual shape with the ideal shape.  These statistics were to be registered in relation to the productions registration systems, allowing for easy comparability of time, when needed.

Solution

For measuring the cheese heights a laserscanner encapsulated in a hood of stainless steel with a polycarbonate frontal glass (image 1) was used, as this is required for such environments.  The laserscanner measures the surface of the cheese (image 3) and knowing the shape of the trays it is able to create a 3D-model of the cheese (image 4), where shape and size can be determined.  As the laser scanner measures optically there is no physical contact with the cheese, leaving it untouched.  This type of measuring results in uniform measurements comparable over time.

The general platform VoluMatrix was adapted the needs for measuring cheeses in trays, where the shape of the cheeses can be classified (image 5) as normal or irregular - e.g. if they are twisted, damaged, full of holes or there are corners missing.  Furthermore the geometrical dimensions and deviations from a perfect box are determined and everything is registerred with production serial numbers, etc. in a SQL-database.

For daily use of the system a client application (image 6 and 7) was developed which controls the lasermeasurements and the registration on a high level.  In this program it is possible to create a production plan for which cheese recipies will be run during a day.  When this plan is effectuated, VoluMatrix can register the measured cheeses according to the production plan saved in the SQL-database.  Afterwards it is possible in the client application to have statistics presented, such as average heights, number of regular vs. irregular cheeses, etc.  When all data is available in a SQL-database many possibilities exist for presenting the statistics in a larger context.