FOREIGN MATTER DETECTION TOPS FOR CHIPS For potato chip manufacturers, having crisps stuck together as doubles is a serious issue. In a nutshell, they’re not fully cooked, and one soft centre can turn a bag of chips rancid very easily. So when Burts Chips in Roborough in England faced the issue head-on, it knew digital sorters of the highest quality would be needed. “We had to rely on manual inspection after our digital sorter to remove doubles,” operations director John Joseph remembers. “Now, that’s no longer necessary.” And when Keogh’s Crisps in Dublin, Ireland, needed to add a sorter to an existing production line, it wanted a quality final product and improvement in production costs. “We’re saving labour now, repositioned six people over two shifts to elsewhere in the plant,” its managing director Tom Keogh says. The answer for both companies – Optyx digital sorters with cameras and lasers made by Key Technology that work to satisfy the rising quality expectations of consumers and retailers around the world, detect challenging defects that plague batch-fried chip manufacturers by identifying colour and opacity, and picking up oil-soaked soft spots, blisters, doubles and clumps as well as green spots, bruises, over-cooked black spots and foreign material. Handling up to 2000kg of chips per hour, the sorters automate inspection to improve product quality and increase yields while reducing labour costs. “We have unrivalled experience sorting batchfried chips as well as continuous-fried chips,” Key advanced inspection systems product manager Marco Azzaretti says. “We design and integrate conveyors that optimise sorting, and achieve the gentlest handling for these fragile products. Our advanced algorithms differentiate doubles – which are rejected – from fold-over chips, which can be accepted.The combination of application-specific hardware and software intelligence helps maximise product quality and minimise waste.” Application software was designed specifically for each client, categorising defects and foreign matter applicable to batch-fried chips. Those handling other products such as vegetable chips can be equipped with application packs that enable product change-overs in seconds. The icon-based graphical user interface can reside locally on the system and be accessed remotely for operator flexibility, supporting remote troubleshooting and service assistance. Sophisticated real-time and on-demand diagnostics help minimise and avoid costly downtime by detecting early conditions that could eventually compromise inspection performance. Information analytics, a set of data acquisition and connectivity tools that allow users to gather a broad range of product and operational data from the sorter, is also featured. “Our sorter gives us confidence in the quality of our product,” Joseph says. “It allows us to concentrate on other things. We’ve got nine batch fryers feeding one digital sorter, so we can be sure that defects won’t end up in our customers’ products. “We are so pleased with this sorter that we’re buying another. It’s the exact same system we already own, but wider so we can increase our throughput.” 20 JULY 2017
FT-Jul17-eMag-1
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