ICON Technologies supplied the Centre for Grain Food Innovations with a portable laptop-based system to monitor mixing power and efficiency on a range of dough mixing machines. The system used a National Instruments USB-9215A data acquisition unit to monitor and log instantaneous power to the mixer from a power transducer attached to the mixer’s input power supply.
The system can acquire raw instantaneous power at a user-configurable rate up to 200 samples/s, and calculates total input energy as the integral of the instantaneous power. The user can pause the mixing process at any point and change mixing conditions or add new ingredients. In such a case the log file is automatically segmented with each segment having its own header information that describes the mixing conditions, and the accumulated power input is reset so that average power under different conditions can be easily determined. The system also includes a calibration routine to allow the user to easily calculate baseline power input.
NI USB-9215A, NI-DAQmx, LabVIEW