Sensors & Electronics
Awards & Recognition
FLC Awards
The developers of the Knife Blade Failure Detection System.2000 - Multi-Blade Knife Failure Detector
Developers: James Skorpik, Richard Pappas, Joe Harris, Juan Valencia, John Julian
Americans alone consume more than 15 billion pounds of French fries yearly. Improvements in fry processing technology that increase output and minimize losses are essential to profitability and dominance in a highly competitive market that operates on large volumes, small profit margins. When a cutting knife failure goes undetected, tons of prime potatoes are reduced to truckloads of defective strips in just an hour. A multidisciplinary team of scientists and engineers from PNNL, Lamb-Weston, Inc., and Delta Computing Systems, Inc., solved the problem by developing and transferring the Multi-Blade Knife Failure Detector (KFD) for Food Processing from PNNL to the production floor so that knife failures can be detected immediately.
Now operating in several Lamb-Weston plants, the KFD takes less than 1 second to identify a blade break, trigger an alarm and signal blade replacement. On one line at one plant, the new system has reduced annual cutting losses by more than 6 million pounds.
The KFD brings high performance, computer-based instrumentation to the plant floor without crippling amounts of capital investment. Designed to operate in severe conditions, the system can be installed and serviced during the plant's regular maintenance cycle. Today, this process monitoring technology can be used to ensure product quality, cut costs, and reduce waste in many other industrial situations where measurements are difficult to obtain.
Excerpted from PNNL FLC webpage.
Selected Links to Related Information:
- Related Examples (Same Project)
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- Multi-Blade Knife Failure Detector (KFD) for Food Processing - 2000 R&D 100 Award Winner