CU LTIVATION AND TECHNOLOGY Mostly dry weather, lots of interest and plenty of novelties vegetable entrepreneurs ery to greengrocers and supermarkets. The NSP is compact and is equipped as standard with a convenient de-stacking device. ‘You can place a stack of empty boxes at the start of the machine and the de-stacker places them one by one on the filling belt. Operation is simple, an emergency stop button is standard, as well as a digital read-out screen.’ A KMK weighing system can be connected to the filler, Den Boer continues. The version at Potato Europe is one with four weighing trays and costs 14,000 euros excluding VAT. For those who want more capacity, KMK also supplies weighing systems with 7, 9, 12, 14 or 18 weighing trays. The price tag that is attached to the new NSP filling machine with de-stacker is 7,000 euros excluding VAT. This is an ideal machine for smaller and start-up entrepreneurs in the fruit and vegetable world that are always short of people to do the filling work’, Kees den Boer explains. TOMRA launches new optical potato grading and inspection machine The mechanical fingers of the TOMRA 3A eject the detected unwanted objects from the product stream as it flies through the air. Getting rid of unwanted (green) tubers and non-potato products already at the grading stage, and immediately mapping out the grading and the number of tubers with their grading sizes, that’s what Tomra’s product manager Jim Frost promises at the launch of the new Tomra 3A, the successor to the Field Potato Grader. ‘At Tomra, food safety and quality are of paramount importance. In addition, we want to reduce food waste as much as possible,’ is how Frost started his presentation of the Norwegian company’s latest machine. He says that the Tomra 3A grading machine has been especially designed to put behind a storage line. ‘We’ve placed this version on wheels to give the user more flexibility, but it’s also possible to mount the unit on a reception hopper’, explains Frost. He says that the machine is available in a 1.20 metre wide version capable of handling 45 tons per hour, a 1.60 metre wide version with a capacity of 65 tons and the widest 2.40 metre model capable of inspecting 100 tons per hour. ‘The highest-capacity version requires an investment of 160,000 euros’, he revealed during the launch. At the push of a button, Frost starts the machine and a batch of potatoes containing all kinds of foreign objects runs through the machine. A glance into the heart of the machine shows that the fingers are easy to reach. ‘This simplifies the maintenance’, emphasises Frost. The mechanical fingers eject the detected unwanted objects from the product stream as it flies through the air. ‘We’ve optimised the shape of the fingers to prevent damage to good potatoes in the product flow. The collection belt for potatoes has also been modified to allow them to land as softly as possible and transport them further,’ explains Frost. The fingers move at lightning speed and eject the unwanted products remarkably accurately from the flow of potatoes. He then points to the high-resolution cameras with colour detection. Frost explains that these are equipped with pulsed LED technology, which is used to remove unwanted material such as stones and clods as well as green potatoes from the product flow. He explains that the cameras are insensitive to changes in light levels, so that they can continue to work accurately in both daylight and darkness. Frost also informs us that the optical system contains no moving parts and that the camera housing is resistant to rain, wind, dust, temperature changes and heat. The 3A version is now also equipped with software that can analyse the flow of potatoes. ‘You now know exactly how many chips or seed potatoes you’re harvesting from one hectare of potatoes’, Frost confirms with a smile. Next year the product manager expects that this information will also be available in a cloud solution, so that users can easily save and share this data. The machine has already been prepared for this with a 4G modem connection.● Leo Hanse and Jaap Delleman Potato World 2019 • number 4 35 Pagina 34
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