Foreign Materials, Conclusion

I was doing so well at blog entries, writing no less than one per week. Then came the July 4 holiday here in the US, followed by a week of presentation-intense work. Lastly, I took a 3-day weekend to watch my youngest daughter play softball (also known as fastpitch). In the meantime, we sent out a "push" email, encouraging you all to read this blog and make comments (please make comments!!!)...

I'm back at it!

Before we go on the describe the ADR-First fundamentals, let's close out the foreign materials topic, last mentioned in my June 20 posting.

Remember that up to then, we had discussed implementing laser/camera combination sorting just prior to packaging, where it would protect the final consumer the best. Now, let's take a look at what would benefit the processor the best: pre-cutting (whole potato) foreign materials removal.

Of course, when foreign materials are removed from a whole potato stream, they are also removed from the resultant finished product. But the added benefit to the processor is the elimination of costly downtime to his cutters.

Without foreign material removal, cutters are constantly at risk from both hard items (stones, glass, metal) as well as other "junk" (fibrous roots/stalks, plastics). When cutters either bind up or break as a result, lots of bad things can happen. Of course, the flow through any one cutter can stop completely, reducing line productivity. More subtly, the cutter can break or be dulled in a way that still allows product to pass, but it is not cut to specifications. Often, this is difficult to detect, and so can affect quite a bit of product before it is corrected; it can thus become even more costly than a plugged cutter.

The solution: place an optical sorter just upstream of cutting, again using both cameras and lasers. As we mentioned in the June 9 post, both are necessary to eliminate the "crossover" in sensing specific items, like potato scab from black rubber. And, if both cameras and lasers can also analyze the shape of the object, a more clean separation of foreign materials can result.

Payback of such a system can be extremely fast, if you can calculate the true cost of cutter downtime.

Sometime, I will write more on whole potato sorting. I do plan to more immediately return to the ADR-First concept, which I think holds great untapped value for the industry.

Until next week-

Tim

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