Applications
What Are You Sorting?
The machine you need is decided by three properties of the material: how it flows, how fragile it is, and how much colour contrast the defect has. Everything else is arithmetic on capacity.
| Material | What you are removing | Recommended family |
|---|---|---|
| Rice | Chalky, yellow, damaged grains, stones, paddy | Chute sorter (KH-128 to KH-512) |
| Pulses & beans | Discoloured, split, insect-damaged, foreign seed | Chute sorter (KH-64 to KH-256) |
| Cashew kernels | Shell fragments, testa, scorched and immature kernels | Belt sorter (KH-KLD / KH-MLD) |
| Coffee | Black, sour, insect-damaged beans; density grading | Belt sorter (KH-MLD) |
| Nuts & dried fruit | Mould, discolouration, shell, grade separation | Belt sorter (KH-KLD) |
| Seeds | Off-colour seed, inert matter, other species | Chute sorter (KH-64 to KH-192) |
| Plastics (PET / PP / HDPE) | Colour mix, foreign polymer, metal, labels | Belt sorter, wide-belt configuration |
| Minerals | Gangue, quartz, feldspar and barite separation | Wet-dry heavy belt (KH-DY) |
| Frozen & wet vegetables | Foreign matter, discolouration, defects | Wet-dry heavy belt (KH-DY) |
Recommendations assume a typical defect load and a clean feed. The definitive answer comes from a sorting test on your own material — which costs you a courier charge and nothing else.
Rice
The specification that actually matters is the reject ratio
Every sorter can hit 99% purity if you let it throw away 10% of the good product. The number that decides whether a rice mill makes money is how much head rice ends up in the reject bin.
Chute machines are the default for rice, sized by channels: a 128-channel machine suits a small mill, a 384 or 512-channel machine a line running several tonnes an hour. What we tune at commissioning is the blast duration and sensitivity, because that is the knob that trades reject ratio against purity.
- Removes chalky, yellow, damaged and red-streaked grains
- Separates stones and paddy from milled rice
- Low-breakage chute design protects head rice
- Double-pass configuration available for premium grades
Cashew
Fragile product needs a belt, not a chute
A cashew kernel that falls down a chute arrives at the camera bruised, and a bruised kernel is a downgraded kernel. Belt machines carry the product flat, so the only thing that touches it is the air blast.
Slow belts are the usual choice for whole-kernel grading where breakage is the main cost. Fast belts are used where throughput matters more than a fraction of a percent of breakage — often on splits and pieces rather than wholes.
- Whole-kernel grading by colour and scorch
- Shell and testa fragment removal
- Low-breakage belt transport
- Recipe switching between grades from the touchscreen
Coffee
Defects you cannot see under a colour threshold
Black, sour and insect-damaged beans are often not a different colour — they are a different texture and sheen. That is precisely the case where a deep-learning model outperforms a threshold-based sorter, and where AutoML lets your own operator train the model on your own crop.
Typical setup: slow belt machine, one pass, with a second pass for specialty grades.
Pulses & seeds
High volume, low margin, so throughput wins
Lentils, chickpeas, mung and soy are sorted in volume at thin margins. Here the chute sorter earns its place: lower cost per tonne, higher capacity, and the defects — split, discoloured, insect-damaged — are genuinely colour-separable.
Typical setup: chute machine sized to your peak intake, not your average.
Plastics & minerals
The hard cases: wet, dusty, abrasive
Recycled flake arrives wet and contaminated. Mineral feed arrives as dust and abrasive grit. Both destroy a standard sorter’s optical box within months, which is why the wet-dry heavy belt exists — sealed optics, self-draining surfaces, and a frame that survives washdown.
- PET, PP and HDPE colour separation
- Label, cap and foreign-polymer removal
- Quartz, feldspar and barite beneficiation
- Coarse fractions from 5 mm to 50 mm
- Single or double deck, up to 12 t/h
Not on the list?
Most of our enquiries started as a material we had never sorted. Send a 2–5 kg sample and a description of the defect, and we will come back with a test result rather than an opinion.