Foreign Material Control

Check this out:
http://www.potatopro.com/Lists/News/DispForm.aspx?ID=1465&Source=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Epotatopro%2Ecom%2FNews%2Easpx

My guess is that PAS is processing potatoes imported from France or Belgium, where fields still hold quite a few grenades from both major wars of the last century. I have not heard of war on the ground in the UK sufficient to leave many grenades behind. I would think that the grenades would be caught by the rock trap before going further into the line. Question is: how to prevent such significant line downtime to an event that is not as rare as you might expect.

Still, kind of shocking, no?

So, let's get back to our previous subject: How and where to apply lasers in potato plants to control incoming foreign materials (FM): both to prevent line downtime and keep FM out of the product. The latter is driven both by product safety and quality perspectives.

There seem to be two places that make sense: Just upstream of cutting and just prior to packaging.

Let's make sure we're clear: FM is anything other than potato. Anything. That includes a lot of materials: glass, metal and stones comprise some of the worst of it. But also bone, vines/weeds, golf balls and other forms of plastic, various garbage such as beverage containers, worker's paraphernalia such as gloves and ear plus, materials from machines such as fasteners and belting. The list is practically endless.

Priority one is to keep this junk out of the product. Since some of it can be entrained at almost any point in the process, the most logical place to remove it is just prior to packaging, where it can be removed piece by piece instead of removing packages.

So the idea is to place a sorting system that employs lasers in the line just upstream of packaging.
At that point, the system can be multi-functional. If one wished to also remove critical defects to tweak a flow back in grade that has slid out of grade, that seems a benefit. Removal of defect at that point is quite expensive, since so much energy and oil has been spent getting it to packaging. But still perhaps cheaper to remove a few than to face bulking off and blending, with its attendant breakage and other degradation.

Plus, the system could be used to collect length and defect statistics.

The system would need to employ cameras as well as lasers (see comments below from June 9).
More on the pre-cutting location next time.

Tim

P.S. Dave R., Barry R.: Thanks for reading. Post a comment or question once in a while, OK?

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