Sorting of bulk goods and recycling

Task

Bulk materials are conveyed goods in bulk form, which must be as pure as possible during industrial processing. For this purpose, different sorting criteria are applied to the individual goods. Examples of such inspection tasks are the sorting of plastic granulates, the detection of foreign bodies in tobacco rib stems, tea, herbs as well as dried vegetables and the sorting of minerals (e.g. calcite, diamonds etc.) or cullet.
 

Solution

The bulk material flies off a conveyor belt at a speed of about 3 m/s and is recorded by a colour line scan camera. Behind the camera line of sight, the unwanted objects are blown out of the material stream by individually controlled nozzles while still in flight. The companies Hauni AG, ROEBER Institut and Binder+Co AG are our partners for industrial implementation. Since May 2005, foreign objects in teas and herbs have been automatically detected and blown out at Salus Haus.

You can find an animation of bulk material sorting here:

Our competences

• Use of various sensor principles for color- to material-specific sorting
• Realization of multi-sensor systems
• Development of task-specific illumination techniques
• Algorithm development for sorting systems - from image processing to AI methods
• Automatic learning of sorting recipes