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22 / September 2020 powderbulk.com OPTIMIZING SCALE ACCURACY FOR AUTOMATED INGREDIENT WEIGHING AND BATCHING APPLICATIONS Powder and bulk solids applications, such as the formulation of food and pet food recipes, have incorporated automated ingre- dient weighing and batching systems into their manufacturing processes, which helps to streamline operations. Making certain that the scale you invest in is appropriate for and capable of precisely weighing and batching your ingredients is imperative and should be done before and after implementation. This article describes the factors that come into play concerning ingredient batching accuracy in automated weighing and batching systems. Terry Stemler, APEC There are many different methods for measuring a material's weight, so standards have been developed. When scales are used in the US for legal-for-trade (LFT) applications (commercial applications where material is sold by weight), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) regulates how A utomated ingredient weighing and batch- ing systems for food, pharmaceuticals, and chemical materials such as flavorings, active ingredients, and catalysts are widely used today. These systems, such as the 12-ingredient system shown in Figure 1, have enabled manufacturers to increase production and decrease both labor and material variation. These automated systems also simplify lot tracking and production record keeping. However, with these automated systems, there's a growing trend for the ingredients that make up a batch or mixture to be more concentrated in order to minimize related shipping and storage costs. These more concentrated ingredients have escalated the demand for highly accu- rate weighing systems. Quite often, there's a trade-off between having a large enough scale to weigh the for- mula and a small enough scale to be accurate. A clear understanding of what automated ingredient weighing and batching systems can do is necessary to design an optimal system with accurate ingredient dosing for your application. Knowing scale standards What is accuracy? Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines accuracy as "freedom from mistake or error" and also as "degree of conformity of a measure to a standard or a true value." In the case of automated ingredi- ent weighing and batching applications, we want to make sure that if a recipe calls for a certain ingredient at a certain weight that we're dispensing the correct ingredient amount. FIGURE 1 A 12-ingredient automatic weighing and batching system