03/17/2011

application story

Bread slicers no longer need to live a shadowy existence in bakeries and supermarkets throughout the world, hidden away behind counters inaccessible to customers. In over 100 countries worldwide, Daub Bakery Machinery BV of the Netherlands offers attractively designed models with which customers can slice the bread themselves. Rotary dampers from ACE Stoßdämpfer GmbH contribute to safe and easy operation.

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“Would you like it sliced or unsliced?” You can ask this question of yourself in many bakeries and supermarkets throughout the world, because the bread slicers shown here from Daub Bakery Machinery BV are increasingly freely accessible to customers, without detriment to their safety or the sales figures. On the contrary: The relocation from behind the counter to the area in front of it reduces the personnel costs, and therefore increases the profits of businesses which use it. Sooner or later, it can therefore be expected that bread slicers such as the D-Self Slicer will become increasingly popular. The Dutch have been producing innovative baking technology for over 100 years, exporting their products and solutions globally, and applying to themselves the claim of designing the “Tradition of the future”. To do justice to this belief, they place great value on quality, flexibility and design both for their own products and those of their suppliers. For the production of the D-Self Slicer, they have found in ACE a partner whose products in the damping sector are known for exactly these criteria.

Sharp blades

No customer is perfectly trained and practiced in the operation of bread slicers. The safety regulations in Germany, as in the Netherlands, therefore place great demands on customer safety. For the developers of the D-Self Slicer at Daub Bakery Machinery, an essential part of the specification was the exclusion of any possible injury that could be caused by the sharp blades of this automatically operating machine. As can be clearly seen, a drop-down protective door was designed. Injuries are impossible, because the automatic slicing process only starts when the door is fully closed. The ease of operation and the safety obvious to every user break down inhibitions about new technology and promote acceptance by customers.

Rotary dampers protects

Smooth opening and closing of the protective door is important for bread slicing machines not only for reasons of safety – it also ensures that customers find the machine pleasant to use. If the opening and closing of the attractively designed hood was jerky, this would not fit in with the design of a modern do-it-yourself bread slicing machine with its rounded, symmetrical shapes and the multi-coloured side panels. It was therefore out of the question in this case that the protective door should be braked in its end positions by the muscle power of the person operating it, or that it should open and close with a loud clattering. A damping solution had to be found which would round off the successful concept and enable a controlled, smooth movement. For this reason, the designers decided to cooperate with the representative of ACE in the Benelux countries, Ralf Küppers, who suggested rotary dampers for the integration into the hood mechanism.

The product trials were completed quickly, the tests were successful, and rotary dampers of type FDT57 are now used in the double-acting bread slicer. The single-acting variant uses very similar looking dampers of type FDN57. The latter differ in that they open and close even more gently than the double-acting models of type FDT57. In addition to the damping method, the maintenance-free, ready-to-install machine elements also differ in their damping torque. For the FDT dampers this is 4.7 Nm, and for the single-acting variant even slightly higher at 5.5 Nm. The key data have been selected so that even 80 % of their maximum performance is sufficient to be able to open and close the protective door smoothly and under control. In both cases, the dampers still deliver this 80 % of their performance capability even after 50,000 cycles. In both models, the force transmission takes place at the shaft or by pinion, and for the opening and closing of the protective door, silicon oil is expelled through a throttle or a gap. The viscosity of the oil and the cross-section of the throttle determine the damping torque. If in other applications the damping torque must be adjustable during operation, this is possible by means of an adjusting screw.

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