Patent Application
20210197203
A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material that is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.
The invention relates to milling machines for disintegrating biological matter into fine powders or slurries.
Mills are used for crushing, macerating, and shredding of biological materials to make medicines, seasonings, and fertilizers, where bulk storage, handling, or processing of powders, granulated or pelletized materials, or pastes and slurries may be more convenient and effective than if these materials were made available in larger flakes, chunks, or larger pieces.
A pin mill includes a rotor plate mounted on a shaft and having concentrically spaced-apart circular arrays of pins arise from an end face. The rotor pins interdigitate with complementary concentric arrays of pins arising from a face of a stator mounted on a door. The door swings open on a hinge mounted on two translator pins so that the door can translate the interdigitated pins before swinging open so that the pins arrays do not collide with each other while the door is opening.
Materials to be processed may be fed into a hopper connected to a conduit directing the material to enter into a disintegrating volume of the inventive machine. The materials are rapidly macerated and broken into finer sized particles between rotating and stationary sets of pins within the disintegrating volume. The rotor operates within a cylindrical screen which retains particles of the materials being broken up within the disintegrating volume of the machine until they are small enough to exit.
The rotor also includes a circular array of vane knives which sweep closely within the screen and split apart particles stuck in the screen that are too large to pass through. The vane knives also include aerodynamic features which entrain cooling air into the macerating volume of the mill. The inflowing air clears particles trapped in the screen, and the vane potions of the vane knives impel particles trapped or resting at the periphery back into the active disintegrating zone where rotating pins pass closely by stationary pins. The vane knives thus refresh the screen by repeatedly clearing its apertures.
Thus a primary objective of the invention is to provide a pin mill for disintegrating material to fine particle sizes by macerating in-fed material between closely-spaced rotating and stationary pins. A corollary objective of the invention is that this disintegrating operation is accomplished quickly and with minimal noise or vibration. In the case of foodstuffs or the processing of biological matter, another corollary objective of the invention is to avoid undesirable heating of the materials in process to prevent cooking or chemical alterations such as denaturing of proteins by in-process heat.
Another objective of the invention is to produce milled material which is uniform in particle size to the extent that such uniformity is achievable.
Yet another objective of the invention is that the mill is easily cleaned, which includes affording convenient access to moving and stationary parts, and convenient ability to expose these parts to effective cleaning methods such as directed streams of water or cleaning fluids which can displace and remove material particles between operations. A corollary objective of the invention is to provide efficacy whereby component surfaces are designed to expose microorganisms to cleansing or sterilizing agents used to clean the mill.
In devices used to process foodstuffs or medicinal matter, it is undesirable for components or component assembly interfaces to act as pores, blind apertures, deep cracks or crevices, or to offer surfaces which accumulate or retain biofilms which in any way impede or impair exposure of cleaning or sterilizing agents to microbial cells present within the machine.
A further understanding of the nature and advantages of particular embodiments may be realized by reference to the remaining portions of the specification and the drawings, in which like reference numerals are used to refer to similar components. When reference is made to a reference numeral without specification to an existing sub-label, it is intended to refer to all such multiple similar components.
While various aspects and features of certain embodiments have been summarized above, the following detailed description illustrates a few exemplary embodiments in further detail to enable one skilled in the art to practice such embodiments. The described examples are provided for illustrative purposes and are not intended to limit the scope of the invention.
In the following description, for the purposes of explanation, numerous specific details are set forth in order to provide a thorough understanding of the described embodiments. It will be apparent to one skilled in the art, however, that other embodiments of the present invention may be practiced without some of these specific details. Several embodiments are described herein, and while various features are ascribed to different embodiments, it should be appreciated that the features described with respect to one embodiment may be incorporated with other embodiments as well. By the same token, however, no single feature or features of any described embodiment should be considered essential to every embodiment of the invention, as other embodiments of the invention may omit such features.
In this application the use of the singular includes the plural unless specifically stated otherwise, and use of the terms “and” and “or” is equivalent to “and/or,” also referred to as “non-exclusive or” unless otherwise indicated. Moreover, the use of the term “including,” as well as other forms, such as “includes” and “included,” should be considered non-exclusive. Also, terms such as “element” or “component” encompass both elements and components comprising one unit and elements and components that comprise more than one unit, unless specifically stated otherwise.
The invention relates to milling machines for breaking down materials into homogenized batches of evenly sized particles. Milling may include cutting, crushing, shearing, and macerating material introduced between moving and stationary features.
The components for disintegrating incoming material operate within a milling volume within a housing that defines an interior. The housing has a first plate [4] which is a front plate, and a second plate [5] which is a rear plate. The milling volume is also enclosed by a perimeter wall spanning between the first plate and the second plate, with the perimeter wall having an arcuate section [11] and a gap below which is an aperture that allows milled material to exit the milling volume, fall through an exit hopper, and leave the machine. The exit hopper in this embodiment includes lower portions of the front and rear plate and planar, sloped sections [17] of the perimeter housing. The housing has an access door which is shut against the housing by knobs [8] which thread into threaded holes in ears [6] on the housing. The housing has hinge pins which attach to the ends of extendable guide bars [9] that are slidingly received into guide tubes affixed to the housing. Rotating components within the mill volume are driven by a drive or rotor shaft [10] seen extending out of the rear plate.
The interior passage of these guide tubes is also called a lumen, and when more than one tube is present on the housing, round lumina and round tubes may be employed to receive round bars as guide bars. However, the housing may also include only one guide tube if its lumen is not axially symmetrical, and a complementary guide bar inserted into the lumen is shaped so as not to rotate therein. Examples of such configurations include but are not limited to an angle channel received within lumen of a complementary shape or a minimal polygon circumscribing the cross section of the angle channel; other simpler examples include polygon bars fitted to slide inside polygon lumina, such as a square bar received within a square lumen or a hexagonal bar received within a hexagonal lumen. Such polygons may be regular or irregular. In all these examples a single guide bar may support a door pinned or otherwise hingeably coupled to such a guide bar for closing the aperture in the front plate of the housing. However, in the figure shown, the guide bars are two round bars and these slide into round tubes having round lumina.
A stator which is a disc having round rods and entirely machined from a single mass of material is a preferred embodiment compared to a plate to which individual pins are pressed or otherwise attached, because discrete pins affixed to a rotor disc would allow microbes to migrate and reside between these parts, reducing efficacy of cleaning or sterilizing agents when the mill is cleaned between batches. Fastening pins onto a blank plate would leave crevices beneath the pins where microbes could get in and contaminate batches of foodstuffs.
By eliminating cracks and crevices wherein microbes may elude sanitizing processes, the opportunity for a colony of unwanted bacteria to become established and contaminate successive batches of materials is reduced.
The stator disc mounts to the inside of the door by means of threaded fasteners [28,] and locator pins [24] accurately align the stator and its features to the rotor assembly of the invention when the door is closed.
In the embodiment shown interior surface of the housing door also includes a round boss or cylindrical surface [21] complementary to an inside diameter a cylindrical screen sized [12] to fit within the housing, so that when the door is closed and secured, this boss supports one end of the screen. The door may be secured shut against the housing by knobs [8] which thread into threaded holes in ears [6] on the housing. The housing has a first plate [4] which is a front plate, and a second plate [5] which is a rear plate. The housing also provides mounting bars [16] for secure mounting in a facility such as with fasteners securing the mill and its motor to an equipment frame.
The disintegrating mill has a shaft-driven rotor assembly which comprises a rotor disc which defines an axis of rotation and like the stator also includes a plurality of radially spaced apart circular arrays of projections. Also as with the stator, a preferred embodiment for these projections uses round bars or pins. Other cross sections for these projections which reside within the scope of the invention include regular and irregular polygons, circles, rectangles, segments of a cylinder and segments of a hollow cylinder. Again like the stator, a rotor which is a disc having round rods and entirely machined from a single mass of material is a preferred embodiment compared to a plate to which individual pins are pressed or otherwise attached, for the same reasons of efficacy mentioned above.
With the aperture in the first plate closed by the door and with the stator attached and accurately located to the door by its locating pins, the first plurality of radially spaced apart circular arrays of projections emerging from a face of the rotor disc interdigitate with and radially alternate with the second plurality of radially spaced apart circular arrays of projections emerging a face of the stator disc. Proceeding in a radial direction, the stationary circular arrays of projections or pins on the stator radially alternate with rotating circular arrays of projections or pins on the rotor. The plurality of circular arrays of projections or pins on the rotor are concentric with each other, and the plurality of circular arrays of projections or pins on the stator are also concentric with each other, so that with the door closed the sets of rotor pins become concentric with the stator pins within an assembly tolerance. The narrower the clearances between the rotor pins and the stator pins, the finer the particle size of materials will be when they pass through the passages between the moving and stationary components of the mill.
Because the stator and rotor pins interdigitate closely and deeply with each other, if the door hinges were fixed to the housing, the swinging action of opening the door would cause the stator pins hung on the door to collide with the rotor pins and prevent the door from opening. Therefore, the housing instead provides door guides [19] for the door to first translate the stator pins apart from the rotor pins in a translation motion indicated by arrow [30] to disengage them before rotating the door on its hinges about a rotation axis shown by arrow [31.]
The door for closing the aperture in the housing is hingeably attached to an end of at least one door guide bar, which in turn is slidingly coupled to at least one door guide affixed to the housing. In this embodiment the door guide bars are two rods each having a transverse hole made at one end for a hinge pin to pass through and couple the door to the pin so that the door may swing about the axis defined by the coaxial set of hinge pins. The door guides are two round tubes which having round lumina each define a translation axis for the lateral motion of the door while the stator pins are interdigitated with the rotor pins. Thus the invention provides a mechanism for translating the door away from the housing first, before swinging the door by rotation at its hinge pins. The hinge axis is supported by one or more guide bars which slide in guides mounted on the housing.
The housing includes a perimeter wall spanning between the first plate and the second plate, with the perimeter wall having an arcuate section [11] and a gap below which is an aperture that allows milled material to exit the milling volume, fall through an exit hopper, and leave the machine. The exit hopper in this embodiment includes lower portions of the front and rear plate and planar, sloped sections [17] of the perimeter housing. A door guide [19] spans between the first plate and the second plate of the housing. In this embodiment the door guide is a round tube which has a round lumen and as explained elsewhere this housing includes more than one such door guide. The door guide tubes also include caps [13] which reduce the opportunity for foreign matter to become entrained within them, which eases regular cleaning.
The rotor assembly includes a rotor disc [35] which defines an axis of rotation and which includes a plurality of radially spaced apart circular arrays of projections [34,] and the rotor disc has a perimeter to which are affixed a set of vane knives [40.] The radial extent of the vane knives is selected so that the rotor assembly in motion resides within the cylindrical screen deposited within the interior of the housing, and the vane knives preferably pass closely within the inner surface of the screen.
The mill may be run between 1500 rpm and 28000 rpm, and chunks, large flakes, or gobbets of matter such as animal meats and organs or plant matter is fed in through the hopper shown in
The vane knives include airfoil sections which develop suction in passing by the screen which may advantageously pull at matter stuck in the pores of the screen. Matter dislodged from the screen in this manner is drawn back into the active macerating zones between the moving and stationary pins. The vane knives also entrain air into the mill to keep temperatures cool and prevent cooking or heating of natural or organic matter being processed. The vane knives actions combine screen cleaning and induction of cooling air allowing this machine to process materials up to 8 times faster than other machines similar in size and processing volume.
At least one vane knife is attached to the perimeter of the rotor disc. Three to six vane knives distributed evenly along the circumference of the disc are preferred, with the embodiment shown having four vane knives [40] attached to the disc perimeter in quadrature. In the event that only one vane knife is used, having the rotor assembly include a counterbalancing mass diametrically opposite the vane knife is advisable.
The rotor disc has an obverse face and a reverse face, and the vane knives project axially forward from the obverse face of the rotor disc to an extent substantially similar to the projection dimension of the macerating pins.
The vane knives also extend axially rearward beyond the reverse face of the rotor disc. Rather than leave these portions cantilevered with no support, the rotor disc includes a hub extending abaft from its reverse face and a back plate [37] affixed to the hub. Arms [38] of the back plate extend radially from the hub and attach to and support the rear cantilevered portions of the vane knives. Cooling air and macerated material may circulate in the large toroidal volume of air defined between the hub, the reverse face of the rotor disc, the second plate of the housing, and the inner surface of the screen as regularly swept by the vane knives.
The axial stack of seals and the pressure plate is statically indeterminate and the first of the two PTFE seals may rotate with respect to the housing, the second of the two PTFE seals may rotate with respect the first seals, the SST pressure plate may rotate with respect to the second PTFE seal, and any, all, or none of these components may rest independently upon the drive shaft, and may rotate independently at any speed between zero and the rotational speed of the drive shaft.
The front plate has a boss which fits inside the inner diameter of the screen, and the rear plate has a circular groove [36] which receives at least a portion of the flange of the screen. The cylindrical surface in the rear plate which supports the screen may be in contact with the inner cylindrical surface of the screen or alternatively may be in contact with the outer perimeter of the flange of the screen. At the door end of the housing, the screen may be supported by a boss in the door which conforms to the inner cylindrical surface of the screen or alternatively the screen may be supported at its outer flange by contact with the rim of the aperture in the front plate of the housing.
Also extending between the front plate and the back plate are door guide tubes [19] which slidingly receive door guide bars. The door is pinned to the end of the door guide bars by at least one hinge pin which passes through a transverse hole or aperture [32] in the guide bars. The guide tubes include caps [13] which exclude dirt.
A drive shaft [10] passes through a central aperture in the second plate for rotating the rotor assembly attached to it by a fastener [2,] and the interconnection between the rotor assembly and the drive shaft may optionally include a keyway and keyseat. A shaft seal assembly includes a shaft seal bezel [50] having a bore closely matched to the shaft diameter, and an inward facing counterbore with a plurality of blind apertures which retain compression springs [42.] A circular pattern of through holes receive fasteners [43] for securing the bezel to the outside of the second plate of the housing. The circular array of compression springs press a pressure plate [48] against two axially stacked shaft seals [47.]
The rotor assembly includes a rotor disc [34] having pluralities of radially spaced apart circular arrays of projections [35] emerging from the disc and extending in an axial direction. The rotor disc also has a plurality of vane knives [40] affixed along its perimeter. The rotor disc includes a hub [14] extending abaft from its reverse face and a back plate [37] affixed to the hub. Arms of the back plate extend radially from the hub and attach to and support the rear cantilevered portions of the vane knives.
The stator disc [25] mounts to the inside of the door by means of threaded fasteners [28,] and includes a plurality of radially spaced apart circular arrays of projections [26.] The stationary circular arrays of projections or pins on the stator radially alternate with rotating circular arrays of projections or pins on the rotor. The plurality of circular arrays of projections or pins on the rotor are concentric with each other, and the plurality of circular arrays of projections or pins on the stator are also concentric with each other, so that with the door closed as shown in this cross section, the sets of rotor pins become concentric with the stator pins within an assembly tolerance. The tips of the stator pins clear the obverse face of the rotor disc by an assembly tolerance, and the tips of the rotor pins clear the obverse face of the stator disc by an assembly tolerance.
The guide bar is slidingly received within a lumen [55] of a guide tube [19.] When pulling the door to translate it laterally before swinging the door on its hinge axis, it is preferable to arrange that the guide bar is stopped from pulling free of the guide tube. An extension stop feature may be included as part of the guide bar or the guide tube. In the embodiment shown in this figure an extension stop is configured by including a deep counterbore in the tube slightly larger than the diameter of the bar which acts as a guide bar, and including a washer [59] slightly larger than the diameter of the guide bar yet sized to travel laterally within the long counterbore. The washer is affixed to a second end of the guide bar with a fastener [58] so that it may travel within the counterbore section of the lumen of the guide tube but will stop short of allowing the guide bar to be pulled out of the tube entirely. The constricted remainder of the lumen of the guide tube is selected to be sufficient to stabilize the translation of the door bars and the door without cocking or jamming. In this embodiment the finite depth of the counterbore functions as the door guide comprising an extension stop. Alternatively, interfering features such as a flange or ear at the second end of the door guide bar or the affixed washer in this figure function as the door guide bar incorporating an extension stop. Lastly in this figure, the guide tube includes a cap [13] that attaches to threads [56] at the end of the guide tube to exclude dirt or foreign matter.
The embodiment of a vane knife shown in this figure includes a blunt leading edge [65] and an angled cutting edge [66,] and a curved portion [68] of the surface facing toward the axis of rotation when this vane knife is affixed to the perimeter of a rotor disc acts as a pressure surface. The blunt leading edge of this particular design impacts and shears through particles stuck in the screen and may pull the obstructive portions of these particles clear of the screen by the vacuum produced in its wake. By this action the vane knife is able to clean the screen or alternatively force the shorn off portions of plugged particles through the screen and out of the mill once they have been sized by extrusion through the pores of the screen.
The vane knives of this embodiment define an airfoil including a leading edge [45] which is a cutting edge residing radially beyond the perimeter of the rotor disc. The airfoil includes a pressure surface facing toward the axis of rotation of the rotor assembly, and a suction surface opposite from the pressure surface. The pressure surface includes a negatively curved surface [68] and the suction surface includes a positively curved surface [64.]The beveled portion [66] of the edge assists in defining the leading edge of the vane knife as a cutting edge for shearing material clogging the pores of the screen residing just beyond the swept volume of the vane knives. These vane knives include cutouts [49] in their trailing edges where they are welded to the perimeter of the rotor disc.
While certain features and aspects have been described with respect to exemplary embodiments, one skilled in the art will recognize that numerous modifications are possible. Further, while various methods and processes described herein may be described with respect to particular structural and/or functional components for ease of description, methods provided by various embodiments are not limited to any particular structural and/or functional architecture.
Hence, while various embodiments are described with or without certain features for ease of description and to illustrate exemplary aspects of those embodiments, the various components and/or features described herein with respect to a particular embodiment may be substituted, added, and/or subtracted from among other described embodiments, unless the context dictates otherwise. Consequently, although several exemplary embodiments are described above, it will be appreciated that the invention is intended to cover all modifications and equivalents within the scope of the following claims.
