Lucky Charms Marbit Separation Critical Design Review May 16, 2003 Gregory Dickman Roy Mitchell Karen Palumbo George Simmonds Scott Walker Andy Wang

© 2002 Lucky Charms Senior Design Team 2 Agenda Background Objective Intricacies and Constraints Deliverables Concept Development Preliminary Testing Concept Selection Fabrication Final Testing Proposed Design

© 2002 Lucky Charms Senior Design Team 3 Background Lucky Charms Cereal Consists of 2 main components, Marbits and Base Cereal. Currently General Mills employs an offline check to ensure the marbit percentage per box. The process is performed by separating marbits by hand. The marbits are discarded after this process, and the base cereal is utilized for further testing.

© 2002 Lucky Charms Senior Design Team 4 Objective General Mills requested that we develop a device, method and procedure to replace the current separation method. The process must… –Be statistically repeatable –Be Accurate within 1% of the current method –Be robust and straightforward –Be completed in 5 minutes or less by 1 lab technician –End with sample of base cereal that can be crushed and used for further testing

© 2002 Lucky Charms Senior Design Team 5 Intricacies and Constraints Marbits and base cereal are approximately the same size, weight and density. Special promotional marbits are often added to the cereal. A budget of $1500 was allotted to the group for research, testing and prototype.

© 2002 Lucky Charms Senior Design Team 6 Concept Development A series of concepts ideas were developed, a few were chosen for further analysis. Concept Development

© 2002 Lucky Charms Senior Design Team 7 Preliminary Testing Tests were performed in the chemistry lab. Simple prototypes were assembled in order to assess the feasibility of ideas. Ideas were analyzed and synthesized to find optimal design. Two most feasible designs were chosen to be fabricated as prototypes.

© 2002 Lucky Charms Senior Design Team 8 Concept Selection Heat Tray designPin Press design Common components were utilized to enable both designs to be fabricated under the allotted budget.

© 2002 Lucky Charms Senior Design Team 9 Fabrication  100% Team Fabricated (Except Heating Element)  Similar Designs  Identical Sub-Frames  Modifications Made to Press Plates

© 2002 Lucky Charms Senior Design Team 10 Pin Press Testing

© 2002 Lucky Charms Senior Design Team 11 Heat Tray Testing

© 2002 Lucky Charms Senior Design Team 12 Heat Tray Testing (Destruction) 198 g separated by hand 198 g separated with heat tray prototype Base cereal was tested for Vitamin C and Moisture Hypothesis tests were conducted and showed no significant difference 5 boxes of cereal tested Base cereal was tested for Vitamin C and Moisture

© 2002 Lucky Charms Senior Design Team 13 Heat Tray Testing (Temperature) Various studies performed to determine optimal temperature of hot plate and pressure time. Plate surface varies within +/- 10 degrees Celsius due to crude dial and nature of heating element.

© 2002 Lucky Charms Senior Design Team 14 Heat Tray Testing (Repeatability) A gage study was performed to determine differences between operators, within operators and between batches. Difficulties resulted due to the non-uniform distribution and randomness of the hot plate.

© 2002 Lucky Charms Senior Design Team 15 Heat Tray Testing (Time) Based on time study analysis, it is estimated that separation would take 6.54 min with a hot plate of the same effectiveness. Based on 100% accuracy (error times included in study) With incorporation of a higher caliber hot plate, it estimated error rates can be reduced by approximately 50% yielding a total process time of 4.80 minutes.

© 2002 Lucky Charms Senior Design Team 16 Proposed Design Based on a 12 by 24 inch proportional controlled hot plate

© 2002 Lucky Charms Senior Design Team 17 Budget

© 2002 Lucky Charms Senior Design Team 18 Questions