RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT OF A VACUUM DOUGH MIXER

The paper deals with the preparation of the wafer dough, the main characteristics and methods for evaluating its quality. The design of the dough mixer to prepare the wafer dough in a vacuum medium has been proposed. The presence of vacuum provides a differential pressure for transporting the dough ingredients from one container to another and intensifies the kneading of the dough, reduces the dough kneading time and the specific energy consumption. The experiments carried out on the experimental setup made it possible to determine the optimum technological parameters of the wafer dough kneading process: the kneading time, the pressure drop in the dough mixer and the rheological parameters of the wafer dough. It has been established that the selection of the rational time of the dough kneading makes it possible to regulate the degree of its aeration and to improve the quality of the baked wafer sheets. The kneading time required for achieving the degree of homogeneity of its structure and readiness for its use for baking waffle sheets has been determined on the basis of the analysis of its morphology and minimum values of dynamic viscosity. The experiments have shown that the full cycle of kneading the dough (taking into account the time for loading of the original components and that for unloading of the finished dough) is 80 seconds. During an hour the proposed dough mixer can carry out 44 complete kneading cycles of the wafer dough, its productivity being 330 kg/h. It is shown that the use of the proposed dough mixer makes it possible to reduce the specific energy consumption for the preparation of the wafer dough by 1.5 times as compared to the serial samples of turbo-mixers.