Key Technology claims its upgrade programme for sorters made by other companies costs less than half the price of replacing an entire sorter, but with like-new performance, the manufacturer claims.
Investment in optical sorters has increased recently due to industry pressures to improve food quality andsafety. Optical sorters are used for food products like fruits, vegetables, nets, potato strips, snack foods, confectionary and seafood. They are used to detect and remove defects and foreign material from such products and attempt to improve the historical trade-off between product quality and yield.
The company's G6 upgrade programme modernises the sorter's vision engine, cameras, and lighting, improving product quality and increasing product yield whileminimising capital costs, claims the company.
A complete upgrade takes less than two days from line stop to start-up. Key will replace monochromatic cameraswith its high-resolution cameras, which the company claims can more accurately identify green and blue defects and distinguish potato peel from browndefects.
Key claims processors can achieve up to an 80 per cent defect rate in the reject stream when operating atcapacity, meaning it can pick up more of the sub-standard ingredients than competiting products.
Improving vision allows the detection and removal of a wider range of defects on a variety of vegetables, including both peeled and peel-on potato strips,improving product quality, the company said.
Key claims its high performance G6 vision engine allows processors to achieve more subtle feature identification, including sorting based on product sizeand product shape. Defective product can even be defined based on where the defect lies on the product.
The multilingual user interface, which is common to popular automatic defect removal systems, resides locally on the system's controller and can also be accessed remotely via plant network or Internet. Costly downtime can be avoided using real-time and on-demanddiagnostics, the company said.
The G6 upgrade also replaces fluorescent lights with a LED lighting system that produces light over a five-year lifetime.Other systems use light systems that need to be replaced between three to six months, the companysaid.
The upgrade includes a 17-inch colour touch-screen control panel on a swing arm.
Key support for other brand sorters includes a commitment to supply all parts and technical service,whether these are supplied by itself or another manufacturer. The modular system is upgradeable so plants canexpand the system.
Key has manufacturing plants in the US, the Netherlands and Australia.