Abstract:
The growth in meat production has raised higher requirements for the precision and automation of meat processing equipment. Current meat slicing equipment suffers from low slicing accuracy and high raw material loss due to imaging occlusion during the quantitative slicing of irregular boneless meat. In contrast, the imaging method based on multi-view point cloud reconstruction is plagued by high deployment costs and poor adaptability to actual production scenarios. To address these issues, this study took pork loin as the research object and developed a high-precision quantitative slicing device based on contour adaptive shaping, aiming to solve the problems of large imaging errors and low slicing accuracy in the quantitative slicing of irregular meat products, and to provide technical references for the design of high-precision quantitative slicing devices for other types of irregular meat. First, the pork loin quantitative slicing device composed of a scanning imaging unit, a contour adaptive shaping module, a slicing execution module and a control system was designed, with the overall dimensions of the device and the parameters of key components defined clearly. Through force analysis, the effective range of shaping force
Fmin,
Fmax for pork loin was derived, and a shaping module integrated with torque, force and angle sensors was built to realize the adaptive closed-loop control of shaping parameters. Second, a PLC-based control system was constructed, which included a perception subsystem integrating various sensors to acquire meat information and shaping motion data, a computing subsystem completing image processing and path planning via a computer, and an execution subsystem controlling the movements of the shaping fixture and slicing mechanism respectively. An adaptive contour shaping motion control algorithm as well as a non-equidistant slicing path planning algorithm were designed to achieve the dynamic matching between the cutter speed and the conveyor belt speed. Finally, pork loin was used as the test sample to verify the actual operating performance of the shaping module and the slicing device. The test results showed that in the conveyor belt and cutter speed matching test, the root mean square error (RMSE) of slicing positions ranged from 0.63mm to 1.07 mm and the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) from 3.98% to 5.15%. A linear relationship
v=0.44
Me+16.10 between the set slicing weight
Me and the conveyor belt speed
v was fitted, providing an optimal speed matching scheme for different quantitative slicing requirements. The verification of shaping effect indicated that after shaping treatment, the mean relative error (MRE) of quantitative slicing of pork loin decreased from 11.13% to 6.24%, and the qualification rate (q) increased from 70.12% to 91.43%, representing an improvement of 4.89% in slicing accuracy and 21.31% in qualification rate respectively. In the tests with different shaping angles, the 60°shaping angle achieved the optimal slicing effect, with the MRE was 6.61% and the q was 89.89%. In the overall performance verification of the device, the continuous slicing tests with set weights of 100 and 150 g showed that the slicing accuracy of chilled meat was superior to that of slightly frozen meat. For the quantitative slicing of 100 g chilled meat, the MAPE was 5.57% and the q was 90.53%. For 150 g chilled meat, the MAPE was 5.11% and the q was 89.69%. Due to internal ice crystals and fiber breakage, slightly frozen meat saw an average increase of 0.76 g in RMSE and 0.84% in MAPE, with the q decreasing by an average of 5.06%. The overall processing efficiency of the device reached 134 slices/min, meeting the demands of continuous production. In the stability test, the MRE of slicing with set weights of 70, 100 and 150 g ranged from 5.25% to 6.57%, and the coefficient of variation (CV) was all less than 10%, demonstrating good operational stability of the device. This study successfully developed a quantitative slicing device for pork loin based on contour adaptive shaping. By designing a contour adaptive shaping structure integrated with multiple sensors, the device effectively solves the problems of large slicing errors and serious raw material loss of traditional slicing equipment in processing irregular meat products, thus promoting the transformation of the meat processing industry towards standardization and digitalization.