F O O D P R O C E S S I N G T E C H N O L O GY
Root crops benefit from foreign material detection
Tomra Food’s new 3A sensor-based sorting machine offers potato growers excellent sorting capabilities, dependability and affordability.
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eveloped in response to specific customer challenges, the Tomra 3A (3A) delivers a new level of foreign material removal. The sorter is typically used at the entrance to a potato storage shed, where it provides a final clean up after the freshly harvested crop has passed through a mechanical grader and soil removal equipment. The unit employs an in-flight inspection and ejection process to detect and remove stones, soil clods and other debris from the incoming product. The 3A is designed to operate at high capacity. This is due to the time pressures of a short harvesting season. It gently moves the product without risk of damaging or bruising it. Jim Frost, product manager at Tomra Food says, ‘In developing this machine, we learnt from working with farmers in this sector and adopted market-leading technologies proven
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Food Review | November/December 2019
in some of our other sorting applications. This machine gives farmers exactly what they’ve told us they want: greater capacity; green potato removal; no product bruising; robustness and excellent reliability; ease of use; movability; additional data and statistics and lower cost of ownership.’
SOPHISTICATED IMAGING TECHNOLOGY ON THE UP The 3A’s sophisticated imaging system, unlike the FPS’s, has colour-detection capabilities to identify unwanted green potatoes. Solid-state, pulsed LED illumination technology with highresolution cameras can distinguish between the crop and foreign material. Amongst the range of signal responses from multiple tailored LED frequencies (some visible and some non-visible infrared), advanced software analysis detects the presence of gross green on sun-exposed potatoes. The sorter is tolerant of overhead lighting effects and eliminates sensitivity
Tomra’s 3A sensor-based sorting machine
