Several other posts have focused on the performance of human operators in a production environment. However video can also be used to better understand how machines operate. The following video clip shows how dough is extruded and then cut off by an automated knife to from the dough balls that will later become the waffles. I took the full video and constructed a “blend” that merged a segment from the video with another segment from later in the same video. If the process is really completely mechanical, the segments (once they are synchronized around the same starting point in the cycle) should pretty much overlap one another.
You should see that the dough balls from different times do not cycle exactly the same way, even though the machine operation cycle has been matched quite closely. What is happening? There appears to be a timing variation between the drop times for the dough balls, even though the machine operation is strictly mechanical.
The answer is that the overall machine operation is mechanical and regular. However, the actual extrusion and cutting of the dough balls is controlled by a sensor that measures whether the dough has completely filled the orifice. The dough material is not completely consistent. It has flour, a lot of margarine or butter and a lot of sugar and it has been allowed to “rise”. Absolute material uniformity is impossible, and in an “artisan” baked product probably undesirable. That means that the extruder has to adjust itself to material non-uniformity at the same time that it has to drop the balls on a chain-driven conveyor.
None of this is obvious to the naked eye. However it is quite evident to the camera … if you can make effective comparisons.
When we originally recorded the video, we didn’t see the behavior until we constructed the blended video. At that point we asked the manager about the discrepancy and that is when we were told about action of the material sensor. By that time, we had already guessed at its existence solely from the odd synchronization we were seeing in the video.