Automation of the process of electropulse processing of vegetable raw materials

Extracting juice and removing excess liquid from vegetable raw materials (vegetables, fruits, gourds, etc.) is one of the main technological operations in its processing. The projected technology of preliminary electric pulse processing of raw materials has great prospects, as it is characterized by low energy costs, environmental friendliness, food safety and can be fully automated, with continuous control over the processing of raw materials and with automatic adjustment of the parameters of the acting high-voltage pulses. The electro technological installation itself is a pulsed voltage generator that acts with a certain frequency of high-voltage pulses on vegetable raw materials, while the process proceeds uncontrollably and one has to rely only on the experience of the operator. The designed system for controlling the process of electric pulse processing, first of all, allows you to constantly receive current information about the damage to the internal structures of plant materials after the impacts, and based on the data obtained, change the impact parameters in automatic mode, thereby achieving the maximum possible technological effect. It was decided to take the degree of disintegration of its intracellular structures as the main indicator of monitoring the current state of the processed raw materials, the quantitative value of which was taken to be 60%. The sequence of execution of the developed algorithm for the functioning of the automated installation is based on tracking the phase shift between the active and reactive components of the impedance of the plant tissue of the raw material before and after the electric pulse flow, followed by a change in the parameters of the acting pulses, thereby automatically maintaining the optimal change in this phase shift.