The present invention generally relates to methods and equipment for performing size reduction operations on products, including but not limited to food products.
Various types of equipment are known for reducing the size of products, for example, slicing, strip-cutting, dicing, shredding, and/or granulating food products. A particular example is the DiversaCut 2110® manufactured by Urschel Laboratories, aspects of which are disclosed in patent documents including U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,472,297 and 3,521,688. The DiversaCut 2110® is adapted to uniformly slice, strip-cut, and/or dice a wide variety of vegetables, fruits, and meat products at high production capacities.
A portion of a DiversaCut machine is depicted in FIG. 1 as an apparatus 10 comprising a casing (or cutting head) 12 that encloses an impeller 14. Food product 16 is delivered through a feed hopper (not shown) to the impeller 14 as the impeller 14 rotates on a horizontal axis within the casing 12. Centrifugal force holds the product 16 against the inner wall of the casing 12 as paddles 20 of the impeller 14 carry the product 16 past a slicing knife 22 mounted on the casing 12 and oriented roughly parallel to the axis of the impeller 14. An adjustable slice gate 21 located upstream of the slicing knife 22 allows the product 16 to move outward across the edge of the knife 22 to produce a single slice 26 from each individual product 16 with each rotation of the impeller 14. The thickness of each slice 26 is determined by the distance between the cutting edge of the slicing knife 22 and the adjacent edge of the slice gate 21. In the embodiment shown, the slices 26 enter circular knives 24 as they radially emerge from the slicing knife 22, with the result that the slices 26 are cut into strips 27 as the slices 26 continue to travel under the momentum originally induced by the impeller 14. The strips 27 then pass directly into a rotating knife assembly 28 equipped with crosscut knives 29 that make a transverse cut to produce a reduced-size product 30 (e.g., diced), which is then discharged from the apparatus 10 through a discharge chute 32.
As evident from FIG. 1, the circular and crosscut knives 24 and 29 are located outside the casing 12, and therefore engage the food product 16 after slices 26 cut from the product 16 have been produced by the slicing knife 22. The slices 26, strips 27, and final diced product 30 are all examples of reduced-size products that can be produced with a DiversaCut machine of the type represented by the apparatus 10 depicted in FIG. 1.
Although the above-described methods and equipment are useful for many size reduction applications, there is an ongoing desire to provide new methods and equipment for performing size reduction operations on products, including but not limited to food products, that result in food product slices having unique shapes.