Doughnut production: Creating the perfect flavoured doughnut
How do you like your doughnuts? With coloured sprinkles? Caramel filling? Or with a plain old chocolate glaze? Whatever your favourite, to make it taste just right, industrial bakeries use flavourings. And this involves an explosion risk.
Explosive doughnuts
An industrial bakery is very different from a domestic kitchen. As well as being on an entirely different scale – with ovens taller than a man, mixing bowls you could take a bath in, and a daily production output measured in tonnes – there are the ingredients themselves. One bakery in the Netherlands, which manufactures doughnuts, uses liquid flavourings to achieve consistent flavour and aroma. Metering flavourings is difficult for various reasons. The amount added has to be extremely accurate, and there is a risk of explosion! This is because most flavourings are not soluble in water, so instead they are dissolved in alcohol – and when alcohol evaporates it creates a flammable air mixture. So strict explosive material guidelines have to be observed in the bakery.
Key data
- Metering of flavourings in a Dutch bakery
- The particular challenge: Risk of explosion due to alcohol vapours
- Metering system with 9 motor driven metering pumps Sigma/ 1
- Delivery of the fully assembled system in a force-ventilated container
- Precise metering with enhanced reproducibility
Made-to-measure container
ProMinent's made-to-measure solution was very easy to install and offers reliable explosion protection. Since 2010, nine motor driven metering pumps of the Sigma/ 1 type have been operating in a force-ventilated container. The container ensures that the alcohol vapours cannot reach the pumps as possible ignition sources, protecting against the risk of explosion. And because the complete metering system was delivered ready-assembled in the container, the amount of installation work required on site was minimal. Project manager Maximilian Franke was also delighted that, thanks to ingenious laying of the pipes and valves, the metering reproducibility was increased from an already remarkable standard value of ±2 % to better than 1 %. The only explosion likely to happen now is the flavour explosion for doughnut lovers.
Safe and accurate metering
- Safe handling of explosive alcohol vapours: pumps in the force-ventilated container
- Ready-to-connect container for quick and easy "plug-in"
- Low-cost maintenance
- Increased dosing precision thanks to individual system planning by ProMinent
- Central control with PROFIBUS