Confectionery Depositor

Overview

A confectionery depositor portions a hot, fluid sweet mass into precise shots and lays them into moulds or onto a belt. It replaces hand-piping for products like caramels, fondants, jellies, fudge and ganache centres, giving every piece the same weight and shape. The principle is volumetric: a row of pistons each sweep a fixed volume, so shot size is set by how far the pistons stroke, not by timing or pressure. The mass has to be kept fluid and uniform, so the hopper is heated and stirred; and the deposit has to be clean and tail-free, so the nozzles carry cut-off needles. Mould plates index one pitch under the nozzles for each deposit, keeping fill and transport in step.

How it works

The mass is held in the Hopper Assembly, a jacketed hopper whose electric Heated Jacket keeps it at deposit temperature while a slow stirrer stops it skinning over or stratifying. From the hopper it is drawn into the Dosing Manifold: a bank of pistons in honed cylinders, each fed through a rotary selector valve. On the fill stroke the valve connects the cylinder to the hopper; on the deposit stroke it switches to the nozzle, and the piston pushes its measured shot out. All pistons are stroked together by a servo-driven yoke, so changing shot size is a single setting.

The metered shots leave through the Nozzle Plate, a heated bar of one nozzle per lane. Cut-off needles snip the product tail at the end of each deposit for a clean break, and the bar is heated so the mass does not set in the nozzles between cycles.

Moulds ride the Mould Indexing Conveyor, which indexes the plates one pitch under the nozzles for every deposit, driven by a servo gearmotor through a belt with a position sensor registering each plate. The Main Drive Motor keeps the dosing stroke synchronized to the conveyor index. The Control System, a motion PLC with a touchscreen HMI, stores recipes, sets shot size and ramps the index, while servo drives run the dosing and conveyor axes in step.