Rancang Bangun Alat Pres dan Pengisian Saripati Tahu Menggunakan Konveyor Berbasis PLC

Abstract

Tofu is a soft, dense food made from soybeans. Currently, the tofu pressing process generally still uses conventional equipment such as stones which are used as pressure loads during the pressing process so that the process can create a risk of work accidents. The aim of this research is to design a tool for pressing and filling tofu essence using a pneumatic system which is used as a pressure load and to determine the thickness of the resulting tofu based on the volume of tofu essence with variable pressing time. The research methods used were observation, literature study, and experimentation. In this research, an automatic tofu essence filling tool was designed which was equipped with a tofu press. The tofu mold used in this tool measures 30 x 30 x 7 cm. The test results of the tool show that filling tofu essence with a volume of 5 liters takes 8 seconds, while the results of pressing tofu for 15 minutes produce tofu with a thickness of 3 cm. Based on the explanation above, it is concluded that the tofu essence pressing and filling equipment using a PLC-based conveyor has worked as expected.