Analytic Color Sorter

Hello, my name is Kent Lovvorn with VMEK Sorting Technology. In this video, we're going to have a basic introduction to the Metrix Analytic Color Sorter.

The Metrix Analytic Color Sorter is designed for either small batch production or continuous production. The basic components are: the hopper where you pour the product; a feeder that advances the product forward; a chute that allows the product to slide, and separate, and be presented to our LED lights which illuminate the product evenly; and then we use sophisticated software and cameras to analyze, looking for defects. If the product is out of tolerance, it will get ejected. If it's within tolerance it'll be accepted.These are all programmable by the operator.

In addition to that physical separation, one thing that makes the Metrix unique and why we call it an "analytic color sorter," is because it also gets data on each individual part - you know, spatial as well as size information. So let's run that for you.

So what you heard at the end of the sample was the automatic clean-out, and this is important so that there's no carryover or anything left in the machine from that run.

But here, so we just ran 2006 parts, and 47 of those were ejected. If you look in our two buckets, we have our Accept bucket which is clean, and then our Eject bucket. You see here we're ejecting the purple corn. We do have a few collaterals which is typical for a sorter of this type. So now let's talk a little bit about the image and the data that we get.

So we use two full-color cameras and have composite analysis which literally allows us to take the front image and the rear image, mate those two together, and make a single decision. That data is also in the composite form.

Our software's quite sophisticated - here we happen to capture the ability to split seeds. So even if two seeds are together, we separate those so that way our count is accurate and also are able to inspect the piece, each individual piece with accuracy.

Onto the data. Here you can see we counted 2006 seeds. 47 those were ejected for a total of 2.3% ejection. That data is captured and saved up to 1 million parts. And here, you know, we get information like the area, length, width, color distribution, and some other information. That data can be plotted. So here we have a plot of our area. So if we want to take off the small guys and the big stuff, and just keep the, you know, what the primary product area typically is, we can do that here. That was not enabled for this run, but that's possible, you can sort by size and by color. And if we just look at a simple plot of our color that we called "diseased." In this case it was just purple corn, but here we can see our clear spike of where - from a percentage standpoint - that the seed was considered to be of this color.

Thank you for watching this video about the Metrix Analytic Color Sorter. There's a lot more details to talk about. We'd like to discuss these with you, so feel free to contact us to discuss your application.