Improvement of Blending Uniformity of Cut Reconstituted Tobacco

To promote the loosening,spreading and blending of cut reconstituted tobacco,following improvements were carried out:1) Relocating the loosening device to the outlet of the two-way belt behind the belt weighter to obtain the optimal loosening effect.2) Designing a cage type loosening roller by incorporating planetary shaft structure to avoid tobacco spreading from being interrupted by a central shaft.3) The optimized rotation rates for traditional and cage type loosening devices obtained by single variable testing were 114 and 48 r/min,respectively.4) Grid sampling method was used for evaluating the uniformity of tobacco spreading.Under the same experimental conditions,the traditional and cage type loosening devices were compared in terms of loosening degree,spreading continuity and blending uniformity of cut reconstituted tobacco.The results showed that:1) The developed grid sampling method effectively improved the testing precision of spreading uniformity and eliminated the deviation between actual and set instantaneous flow of cut reconstituted tobacco.2) Replacing traditional loosening roller with cage type device effectively improved the loosening efficiency and blending uniformity of cut reconstituted tobacco,the difference between the proportions of cut reconstituted tobacco and cut strips in a unit area decreased from ±5% to ±0.5%.The loosening degree and blending uniformity of cut reconstituted tobacco and the consistency of intrinsic quality of cut filler were improved.