Food Automation Sauce Pump Details

Looking at delivering the best food pump for the design specifications given. With not knowing which pump to use, I created a test pump stand to test them all. The stand took food products like ketchup and relish, pumped them in a continuous loop. I set up a Peristaltic, sine and lobe style pump.

Pump Type

Preliminary Testing

The first pump to start the test was a cheap Peristaltic pump with 1/2in ID tubing. This test was designed to pump relish in a loop, seeing the pump’s effects on the chucky materials within. The thought was the action of the pump would turn the sauce into mush after a few cycles.

Next pump in the lineup was a sine-pump. This pump uses a sinusoidal feature on a plate to generate the pumping action. These pumps are less common, so a 3D printed version was created, and water was cycled through for testing.

A lobe pump was also added to the lineup. Lobe pumps are more common but not in the small formfactor this application was looking for. So, a 3D printed version was created for testing.

A very economical peristaltic pump was thrown into the lineup. The price point was too good not to try. However, this pump never made it past the preliminary testing. The pressure in the hoses with thicker sauce caused the hose-ends to pop off,

Preliminary Results

The initial test results showed the larger peristaltic pump and the 3D printed lobe pump are good candidates’ for a sauce pump. The option of pumping thick chunky sauces was the major deciding factor in the test

The sine pump did not pass

Endurance Testing

For endurance testing, a custom machined lobe pump was created and competed against the larger Peristaltic pump. The goal in this test was to measure dispense volume over time.

The pumps were monitored by an Arduino. Each pump had a sensor on the motor output to measure number of revolutions. This was compared with a flow sensor attached to each pump’s output. With this data, the dispense volume per revolution could be tracked over the expected life of the pump.

Internal image of the machined lobe pump

Endurance Testing Results

After acquiring over 2 million data points, I was able to show the lobe pump design holds its dispense volume per-rev over the life of the pump.

The peristaltic pump’s dispense volume changed over time, resulting in its disqualification.