Plastic article or earthenware shaping or treating: apparatus – Means making particulate material directly from liquid or... – By slinger or rotating liquid comminutor
Patent
1997-09-08
1999-03-02
Woo, Jay H.
Plastic article or earthenware shaping or treating: apparatus
Means making particulate material directly from liquid or...
By slinger or rotating liquid comminutor
425145, 221186, B29C 4700
Patent
active
058767649
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an automatic cotton candy machine. Cotton candy is a confection made of sugar filaments wound onto a stick.
2. Description of the Related Art
Traditionally, cotton candy is made with continuous involvement of an operator. A cotton candy machine has a hollow cylindrical head filled with sugar, heated to approximately 150.degree. C., and revolving at high speed, between 3000 and 5000 rpm. The head has radial orifices and the melted sugar is centrifuged in the form of filaments. Dispersion of these filaments in the outward direction is limited by a basin-shaped receptacle. The operator, provided with a stick or cardboard cone, collects the filaments of centrifuged sugar and forms them into a ball with a diameter of approximately 30 cm. He executes two kinds of manual movement: he twirls the stick around its own axis and swipes the stick along the basin wall.
The attempt has already been made to make automatic cotton candy machines. Such a machine is described in Document FR 2,248,792.
However, such machines could never be operated satisfactorily and independently because the stick supply hopper allowed storage of only a limited number of sticks, because stick pickup was unsatisfactory as the sticks had to be perfectly calibrated, which is not the case in practice, leading to breakage of certain sticks that were off-center relative to the stick holder, and finally because the discharge device for the formed cotton candy could not be implemented for both technical and hygienic reasons.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The goal of the invention is to furnish a machine for automatic production of cotton candy that can operate independently by means of a coin meter, a card device, a simple button, or any other mechanism triggering the production process without requiring the continuous or intermittent presence of an operator, its design taking into account the irregular shapes of the sticks, and requiring periodic loading, at very long intervals, of both the sticks and the soft sugar.
For this purpose, the machine to which it relates, of the type having a stick hopper for dispensing the sticks one by one, a device for transferring each stick to a chuck between whose jaws the stick is held while protruding into a basin containing the sugar sprayhead, the chuck being driven rotationally, as is the sprayhead, during the cotton candy forming operation, is characterized in that the stick hopper is comprised of a cylinder with a horizontal or substantially horizontal axis, said cylinder being mounted to pivot about its axis and being associated with a rotational drive means, said cylinder further being equipped on its internal face with at least one lengthwise bar delimiting a cavity that matches the shapes of the sticks, said cavity being provided in the face of the bar that faces forward in the direction of rotation of the cylinder, said cylinder containing, below its uppermost generatrix, a device for collecting each stick picked up by the bar in the hopper and escaping the latter under the effect of gravity.
Since the sticks intended for forming the cotton candy are usually made of wood, square in cross section, 4 mm on a side, they have a cross section that is not perfectly consistent, and are not always straight, with ends that are sometimes chipped. Moreover, these characteristics may vary according to atmospheric moisture and storage conditions. The device according to the invention allows a large number of sticks to be loaded into the cylinder. The sticks are gripped individually with a rod delimiting a specific cavity, and the nonmatching sticks, for example a stick that is not straight, will not be picked up by the rod and not transferred to the cotton candy forming station. Aside from the fact that this device allows the sticks to be processed simply with shape monitoring, it stores a large number of them with no need for the operator to position them precisely, as one need only load in the sticks in bulk, oriented substantial
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Buttin Paul
LeCulier Jean-Marc
Hopkins Robert
Woo Jay H.
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