The models can be of different dimensions, fed manually or automatically. They can be steady or mounted on structures with wheels or feet that can be easily moved from different lines to the kneading machines.More advanced units dry the milled scraps and act as a dosing machine to control the flow of the obtained flour to the kneading machines to ensure an even feed to the hopper and have a stable and standardized quality dough, spreading evenly the white spots or lumps that the regenerated semolina can cause in the final product. Usually scrap shredding units of contained dimensions are coupled at each final parts of the lines, rather than having a network of belts conveying the scraps to a single unit of big dimensions. Still pasta machines can have a simple transporting belt collecting and convoying scraps in steel or pvc trays. These containers are manually moved to a special recovery unit supplied with an elevator to pour the products into the shredder tanks. The milled scraps can be pneumatically or belt conveyed to one or more kneading machines or to tanks for different purposes. When regenerated semolina is pneumatically conveyed, a centrifugal fan sucks in the crushed scraps and brings it to a cyclone over the kneading hopper ready to be evenly mixed to raw material. Pneumatic automatic elevator column can carry the powder at different heights, longer is the pipe and higher is the hopper to reach and more power in Kw is required. A detailed cleaning schedule has to be provided, since contamination and a flawed use of the machines could affect the whole recovery procedure. During the production the accumulation of dust on the edges can cause microbial contamination, waste of energy and uneven flow of the power. Machines should be easy to disassemble with quick openings on the entire equipment, taking care especially of engines, pipe bends, rotors, grinders and filters. An aspect to take in account for this stage of processing and reusing of scraps is the traceability. This information collected during the production and the refilling with scraps powder will be retained and integrated into the final product lot in order to return an immediate traceability of the product. For this purpose softwares are designed to monitor the movements of the powder during the production and detecting any variation on the process.
by Flavio Levati
