Application of Taguchi technique for robust quality control of ball-milled slurries

Sugar in concentrated syrup requires the initial sugar microcrystal to grow and produce sugarcrystals. The crystal size distribution (CSD) of the seed slurry can be a factor in the productionof high quality sugar. The primarily manufactured nuclei have different sizes and thischaracteristic is expressed by the coefficient of variation (CV). Due to the multiplicity ofparameters and to decrease the time and cost of experiments, the Taguchi method was utilizedas off-line quality control. After that, analysis of variance (ANOVA) determined thesignificance of each parameter. In this study, sugar to solvent ratio, time of milling, number ofballs and alcoholic phase ratio were input parameters. Under the optimum conditions, the meanvalue of CV and signal to noise ratio (S/N) were estimated as ۴۷.۵۴% and -۳۳.۷۶۶۳,respectively. The proposed procedure was satisfactorily evaluated by confirmatory testing.

کلیدواژه ها:

Coefficient of variation ، Taguchi optimization ، Image analysis ، Ball mill.