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QSorter Explorer from QualySense - The most advanced technology for cereal analysis and sorting


Switzerland
September 19, 2014

The QSorter Explorer transports each kernel at high speed and at a fixed orientation to a measurement area where a light source is placed. A high-resolution Near Infrared (NIR) spectrometer measures the amount of light that is absorbed by the kernel while a color camera (VISION) takes an image of it. The two signals are processed by state-of-the-art algorithms that extract the biochemical fingerprint of the kernel as well as its physical features such as shape, size, and color. A real-time sorting decision is made according to the measured properties. 

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Your main benefits:

  • Single kernel analysis and sorting of multiple properties
  • High-speed transport of kernels in a fixed orientation
  • Real-time and repeatable inspection of samples

Speed: 50 kernels per second

Finding Impurities and Other Cereals

The QSorter Explorer can identify impurities based on biochemical content and on physical traits with a high accuracy (> 90%) and at a speed at least 20 times faster than ...
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Breeding and Phenotyping

Our robot can measure concurrently multiple properties such as biochemical properties (e.g. protein, moisture) and physical traits (e.g. size, shape). You can ....
Read more

Process Monitoring and Quality Inspection

The combination of high-resolution Near Infrared spectroscopy and VISION imaging allows to monitor production processes more often or to inspect samples faster ....
Read more

5th Place at the Swiss TOP100 Startups 2014

On 17th Sep 2014, QualySense was presented with the Swiss TOP100 Startup 2014 Award. This year, the company placed 5th and continues climbing the ranks of the best Swiss technology startup as its milestones continue to be reached.
 

Finding Impurities and Other Cereals

Today, in order to detect impurities in a sample of cereals, one trained person inspects manually a 250 g sample in about 1 hour in a laboratory environment to define the purity level of the sample. The manual inspection is based on shape and color features. The variations of these physical parameters are often small enough to challenge even the most trained inspectors as well as detection technologies based only on digital imaging.
 
Thanks to QualySense unique and patented technology, the QSorter Explorer is able to reach classification accuracies higher than 90%. The process allows separating the sample in two baskets: the first basket contains the main commodity and a number of other cereals within the customer-accepted tolerance and the second one contains the other cereals with some kernels of the main commodity (i.e. the algorithm error). As a consequence the manual inspection will focus only on the second basket, which makes the inspection process 20 times faster. In addition, the QSorter Explorer repeatability error is less than 2%, which is 10 times lower than the estimated human error.
 
The QSorter Explorer improves the consistency and the speed of the quality inspection, thus leading to a more consistent and repeatable purity measurements.

 

Breeding and Phenotyping

Characterizing seeds and selecting the best ones for breeding and phenotyping purposes is not an easy job. Today, laboratory methods allow the measurement of a few traits at a time and are time consuming. This leads to the formation of populations composed of only few individuals. This is certainly fine for some preliminary analyses but, unfortunately, does not enable scientists to obtain robust results because of the poor statistics and may result in an unsatisfactory selection or production efficiency. 
The QSorter Explorer is the perfect equipment to drastically change the rules of breeding and phenotyping. In fact, our robot enables the measurement of several biochemical properties such as protein, moisture, gluten, oil and of several physical traits such as, shape, diameter, color and all simutaneously. In one pass, the scientist gets a deep understanding of the sample. The screening produces a complete identity card of the analysed sample and reports the measured properties for each kernel. The scientist can then look at the quality distribution of each property and understand how one or more traits vary inside the sample. In addition, the patented and unique transport technology of the QSorter enables the selection of the best seeds through pneumatic sorting, which has an accuracy of 99%. The QSorter processes, in average, 50 kernels per second, which implies that large populations can be analyzed and therefore leading to robust statistics.

 

Process Monitoring and Quality Inspection

The QSorter Explorer is the most advanced technology for cereal analysis and sorting and it brings clear advantages for the monitoring of industrial food processes and for quality inspection practices. During food processing or seed production a certain number of samples need to be inspected in order to reach the required quality assurance levels. Today, the inspection of samples is done by trained personnel and may be complemented by other equipments such as screens (also called gravity tables), which are used to reject foreign material or to sort the kernels by size. The manual and visual inspection is affected by repeatability errors up to 30% and can also lead to the non-detection of defects that are present in small percentage. On the other side, inspection equipment such as screens rejects a large number of sound kernels, which is estimated, up to 20%. Overall, the same sample needs to be inspected twice. The QSorter Explorer adopts high-resolution Near Infrared spectroscopy and VISION imaging sensing technologies to measure several properties at the same time and at an average speed of 50 kernels per second. Thanks to these unique features, the inspection steps can be combined, which results in a strong time savings. In addition, more samples can be analyzed, which increases the monitoring frequency. Furthermore, the unique and patented technology enables transport of each individual kernel in a fixed orientation, which allows the sensor to measure properties with a very high accuracy (>90%) and, on the other side, to minimize the reject of sound kernels to less than 2% . As the algorithms are built on thousands of data points, the repeatability error is less than 1%, which makes the QSorter Explorer the most reliable robot for quality inspection and process monitoring.



More solutions from: Ferrum Analytics and Sorting AG


Website: http://www.qualysense.com

Published: September 19, 2014

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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