A third application for a servo system is provided in Fig. 11-92. In this application a large filling tank is used to fill containers as they pass along a conveyor line. The material that is dispensed into the containers can be a single material fill or it can be one of several mate-rials added to a container that is dumped into a mixer for a blending operation. Since the amount of material that is dispensed into the container must be accurately weighed and metered into the box, an auger that is controlled by a servo system is used. The feedback sensor for this system can be a weighing system such as the load cell discussed in earlier chapters. The command signal can come from a programmable controller or the operator can enter it manually by selecting a recipe from the operator's terminal. The amount of ma-terial can be different from recipe to recipe.

The speed of the auger can be adjusted so that it runs at high speed when the con-tainer is first being filled, and the speed can be slowed to a point where the final grams of material can be metered precisely as the container is filled to the proper point. As the price of material increases, precision filling equipment can provide savings as well as quality in the amount of product used in the recipe.