SEPTEMBER'S PUZZLER

摘要

We are suffering an excessively high level of rejects from our process to coat corn flakes with aspartame (Figure 1). Instead of individual flakes, we see clumps coming out of our dryer. Only about a third of our product gets packaged — the weigh cells on the dryer exit conveyor reject the rest of the flakes as over-weight because of clumping. I'm convinced we have a mixing problem. An instrument engineer says the Coriolis meter is plugged. The plant engineer is certain the spray nozzle is fouled. And a production foreman says we're not properly sifting the aspartame added to the mixer. Aspartame is expensive, more than $800/lb. What do you think is causing our problem and how do we fix it?