A Few Tidbits
Sorts 7.5 tons of material per hour. That is equivalent to 250 pounds of trash a minute or 4 crushed wine bottles each second.
The system is capable of 4-way sorting. In other words, it can sort clear (flint), green and amber glass and trash all at the same time.
The system sorts the glass using three rows of air jets. There are a total of 864 independently controlled jets. More than 170,000 on/off air jet decisions are made each second based on images taken of the material in flight.
As the material falls off the conveyor a computer produces an image of what is in flight. Over 4-million pixels are processed each second to determine which air jets need to fire. The image processing software has about 5-milliseconds (1/200th of a second) to decide which jets will be fired before the material has flown past the first row of jets.
Video
The following videos were captured during initial debug of the first system. The system sorts much better than these videos indicate. The shipped systems produce sorted glass with less than 0.5% trash contamination and less than 5% color contamination (wrong color in a chute).
The first three videos are taken with a high-speed camera.
|
I like this video. It looks like it might be staged, but sometimes the material you receive is just very trashy. I think this clip would make a good "I Spy" game. At this point we were still trying to determine the correct conveyor speed, manifold spacing and chute layout. |
|
A grid of 1/4" diameter plastic discs are randomly placed on the conveyor. The discs are red, green and clear. The first row of air jets (top left) will shoot the green discs out of the stream as it flies by. |
|
This video was taken early on when we were working out the chute design. The first row of jets is shooting out green and amber (gramber) glass and the second row of jets is shooting any remaining glass (presumably clear and blue). |
The following video shows the sorter actually running the gramber/mixed test from the above video. The performance is not wonderful, which is why we were taking high-speed videos. The material throughput in this video is relatively slow. 7.5 tons / hour is much faster.
|
