Bake delicious wafers safely, all over the world!

According to industry insiders, every second wafer manufactured industrially worldwide is baked using a Franz Haas wafer machine from Bühler. As a result, all customised plants must be highly flexible and, above all, meet all country-specific safety standards. That’s why the Austrian wafer machine specialist relies on the burner version of the configurable safe small controller PNOZmulti 2 to safely control and monitor its ovens. After all, the TÜV-certified burner block in the software tool PNOZmulti Configurator is flexible and can be used worldwide for a variety of customised machine configurations. 

PNOZmulti 2 carries out functional safety and burner control tasks as a complete solution in a single system; these are tasks that were previously performed by separate burner controllers. That’s quite a challenge, as monitoring involves a complex control sequence: At the heart of every wafer production line is the oven, which may be up to 35 m long depending on the product and plant configuration. The heating is provided by gas-fired long tube burners. The burner controller's most important task is to monitor the extinguishing of the flame and if necessary to interrupt the gas supply immediately in order to avoid an explosion in a worst case scenario.
Some older burner controllers without bus capability have already been replaced by PNOZmulti 2 – another application area for Bühler because, as a modular system and with wide-ranging configuration software, PNOZmulti 2 is flexible and adaptable in terms of hardware and software.

The forming process for a typical wafer - example ice cream cones: The dough is poured onto individual baking plates that circulate through the oven at up to 0.5 m/s.

At the end of the process the wafer is shaped into a pointed cone. The burner controller from the safe small controller PNOZmulti 2 monitors the baking process, regulating the gas supply and therefore the flames.

Production lines for the most diverse wafer varieties – flat and hollow wafers, wafer rolls, ice cream cones, waffles and wafer snacks – are developed at the Wafer Innovation Center at Bühler.

• Connection to existing automation environments: Thanks to the openness of PNOZmulti 2, Bühler's automatic wafer baking ovens can be used worldwide
• Burner type also suitable for retrofit: thanks to the configuration software, the hardware and software on older burner controllers without bus capability are flexible and adaptable
• Suitable for international use due to TÜV-certified burner software block

Company founder Franz Haas invented the first wafer machine as early as the end of the 1940s. Since 2018 the company has belonged to the Swiss Bühler Group, with subsidiaries around the globe. 700 people are employed in the wafers area of the Consumer Foods division at the Leobendorf site, working in development, design and production, as well as sales, service, maintenance and spare parts management.