Foods and beverages: apparatus – Means to treat food – Subdividing into plural products
Patent
1994-07-29
1996-03-05
Simone, Timothy F.
Foods and beverages: apparatus
Means to treat food
Subdividing into plural products
99546, 99643, 99491, 209586, A23N 1504
Patent
active
054957974
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
The present invention relates to a device for automatically processing mushrooms.
A particularly advantageous application of the invention lies in the field of trimming cultivated mushrooms, in particular prior to preserving them.
French patent application No. 91 07782 in the name of the Applicant discloses an automatic mushroom-processing device constituted by a mushroom stem cutting installation comprising conveyor means designed to bring said mushrooms to a cutting station that includes a cutting member for trimming the mushrooms individually. In that known installation, said cutting station includes detector means, e.g. an optical pattern recognition device suitable for determining the length of the stem of each mushroom. Control means are also provided to adjust the relative position of the cutting member and of the mushroom stem as a function of the stem length as determined by said detection means. Naturally, the above adjustment operation does not happen instantaneously but requires a certain amount of time, referred to as the response time Tr, which time separates the instant at which the mushroom is taken into account by the detection means and the instant at which the cutting member reaches the cutting position corresponding to the length of the stem of said mushroom. By way of example, the cutting member used may be constituted by two coplanar saw blades rotating in opposite directions. In general, the cutting member presents a certain trimming distance C defined as being the distance travelled by a mushroom between the moment cutting begins and the moment cutting ends.
The conveyor means are fed with mushrooms by a feed device that provides calibrated mushrooms of given caliber Cal at a given mean rate D. The term "caliber" is used to designate the mean value of a given range of mushroom cap diameters.
The conveyor means in the installation known in the state of the art make use of at least one set of belts, and more particularly they make use of two successive sets of belts in which the second set is faster than the first set so as to increase the distance between two consecutive mushrooms in order to leave the cutting member with enough space to move between the stems of said two consecutive mushrooms, given the trimming distance C.
Naturally, in general manner, a device for automatically processing mushrooms may include processing stations other than a cutting station, e.g. a station for ejecting out-of-specification mushrooms, each processing station being defined by a response time Tr.sub.i and a processing distance C.sub.i, where i lies in the range 1 to the number N of stations. The mushroom conveyor means of the processing device are then subjected to constraints of two types:
the mushrooms must be processed one by one, which means that there can be only one mushroom present over the processing distance C.sub.i of each processing station; and
the time interval between two mushrooms must be sufficient to allow each processing member, given its response time Tr.sub.i, to be controlled by said respective control means before the said mushroom is presented to said processing member.
By an appropriate choice of belt speeds, the above-described cutting installation can satisfy both the above conditions, however, particularly when fed manually, it does not always make it possible to obtain a regular stream of mushrooms in the sense that for a given average rate D, the space or time interval between two consecutive mushrooms can be too small to satisfy the above-specified conditions.
Thus, the object of the present invention is to propose a device for automatically processing mushrooms of given caliber Cal, the device including conveyor means designed to bring said mushrooms to at least one processing station including detection means suitable for determining a parameter relating to each mushroom, a processing member for processing the mushrooms individually over a given processing distance C.sub.i, and control means suitable for bringing the processing member into operation after a response t
REFERENCES:
patent: 3164182 (1965-01-01), Hughes et al.
patent: 3596693 (1971-08-01), Baker
patent: 3727542 (1973-04-01), Blanchaud et al.
patent: 3734004 (1973-05-01), Losito
patent: 4457434 (1984-07-01), Brown et al.
patent: 5253765 (1993-10-01), Moorehead et al.
S.A. Royal Champignon
Simone Timothy F.
LandOfFree
Device for automatically processing mushrooms at an optimum proc does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this patent.
If you have personal experience with Device for automatically processing mushrooms at an optimum proc, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Device for automatically processing mushrooms at an optimum proc will most certainly appreciate the feedback.
Profile ID: LFUS-PAI-O-1406140