Plastic article or earthenware shaping or treating: apparatus – Means making particulate material directly from liquid or...
Patent
1995-07-24
1997-01-07
Mackey, James P.
Plastic article or earthenware shaping or treating: apparatus
Means making particulate material directly from liquid or...
425188, 425381, 425466, 425DIG230, 264 8, 264142, 2641761, 425215, B29B 910
Patent
active
055914586
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The invention refers to an apparatus for manufacturing granulated material from free-flowing viscous substances that are made into drops and solidify or gel, consisting of a vessel, charged with the free-flowing substance, with a discharge opening arrangement that is intermittently opened or closed by a perforated belt that is periodically moved therepast.
An apparatus of this kind, in which a continuous slit, against whose lateral delimiting walls the perforated belt lies, is provided as the discharge opening arrangement of a tubular vessel, is known from EP 0 134 944 B1. The slit, running transverse to the belt travel direction, must have a certain width (i.e. a dimension in the direction of belt travel) in order to give the openings of the belt, as they move past it, time to fill up with the substance being formed into drops and then deliver it in portions onto a cooling belt located therebelow. Especially when comparatively viscous substances, which enter the slit space under pressure, need to be formed into drops, this can cause the force resulting from the slit area and the pressure to become so great that the belt being guided past the lateral delimiting walls of the slit is pushed outward (downward), so that in an undesirable manner, additional material becomes distributed spread on the side of the belt facing the vessel.
The underlying object of the invention is to provide a remedy for this, and to propose a capability that, guarantees that the belt lies as closely as possible against the outer surface of the vessel, without adversely affecting the apparatus.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The invention proceeds from the consideration that it is not possible to reduce the width of the slit, especially at high production rates i.e., at high relative velocities between the perforated belt and the vessel, since then the perforation openings in the belt do not fill up with the material in the desired manner due to the short filling time available to them. The invention involves the outflow openings being formed by a plurality of rows of openings, the rows arranged transverse to the travel direction of the belt. The openings are preferably offset from one another so that their cross-sectional area over which the perforation openings of the belt travel is always the same size regardless of the position of the movement track of the perforation openings. This embodiment possesses on the one hand the advantage that the total area of the discharge openings of the vessel is reduced, so that the force acting on the belt is also decreased, but on the other hand that because the openings in the vessel are arranged one behind another, enough time is available for the perforation openings in the belt, as they travel past the various rows of openings, to be sufficiently filled with material for the purpose of forming drops.
The embodiment according to the invention also, however, possesses the advantage that despite the arrangement of rows of openings, there is no danger that, if the perforated belt (which in operation can never be guided exactly in the travel direction) runs off centre, the same quantity of the substance being formed into drops will always enter the perforation openings of the belt, which of course is always the case with a slit extending transverse to the belt travel direction. Because of the arrangement of the openings according to the invention, the rows of individual openings acting as outflow openings function in the same way as a continuous slit.
In a development of the invention, all the openings can be of the same size, and their periphery can possess a common tangent with openings in other rows. This provides assurance that regardless of the travel direction of the perforation openings, the same cross-sectional area is always being traveled over, so that even if the travel direction of the perforated belt deviates laterally, there is no danger that too little material will enter the perforation openings. Of course the absolute size of the diameter of the holes,
REFERENCES:
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patent: 5378132 (1995-01-01), Kaiser
Froeschke Reinhard
Konig Axel
Mackey James P.
Santrade Ltd.
Schwartz Iurie A.
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