Highest resolution and easy to operate

The Clipper talked to Paul Berghmans, partner and CTO, Optimum NV, Hasselt, Belgium about a new company with a revolutionary machine.

Who is Optimum Sorting?

The name means that we are striving to find the optimum solution to a given problem. It is not our intention to sort a lot of product neither to sell many machines. We are manufacturing and supplying machines exactly according to the specs of our customers.

It does not mean always an 99.9% accuracy?

We can achieve 99.9% if that’s what the customer wants, but some of our clients want only 80% or 9O%. In that case we deliver what the customer wants to optimize his production line. Every customer has his individual strategy regarding the product he wants to sell to his customers. He might have high-end customers, premium customers or low-end customers. With our technology he can tune in exactly what he wants!

Please tell us about the founders of the company.

We founded our company just recently and presented Optimum Sorting on the Almond Conference in Sacramento in December 2018. Our first action was to acquire Concept Engineers BV out of Eindhoven, The Netherlands, who specializes in camera sorting. With this acquisition we brought new technologies to them. The concept shareholders re-invested in Optimum to support further growth.

Optimum today is made up by myself and partners. You know I am in the sorting business since 1985 during Elbicon times. I was involved in the engineering of the first laser sorters Elbiscan 5000-6000 and the startup up Best in 1996. In other words, I am sorting all my life. Steve Raskin, our CEO and partner, invested in our company as well.

Steve started his carrier in the sorting business at Barco, which was later acquired by Best. When Best was acquired by Tomra, Steve became sales director for the Emea region (Europe, Middle East and Africa). To insure enough capital for further growth we also involved Pentahold, a strong financial partner with an industrial background. So besides myself we have the five former owners of Concept Engineers, Steve, Pentahold and Jan, our R&D manager, as the shareholders of Optimum Sorting. This management team altogether has a quite impressive sorting experience of more than 200 years.

At this moment we have three locations; Our headquarter in Hasselt, Belgium, our competence center for camera technology in Eindhoven, Netherlands and a sales and service center in Denver, Colorado US. In Hasselt we specialize in R&D and laser technology. We are manufacturing the camera based machines in Eindhoven and the Laser systems, like our brand new Ventus, in Hasselt.

What has been done so far?

Firstly we developed a laser system to be added to the existing Triplus and Focus productlines. The laser scanner was used to complement the already existing camera technologies in thes product lines resulting in increased sorting efficiencies for the existing customers. The Ventus is the latest model in laser sorting especially for dried fruit and nuts. With the Focus and the Triplus we were already strong in sorting vegetables, potatoes and candies, but now with Ventus we enter into sorting dried fruit and nuts.

What is you think why Ventus is standing out of other models?

The machine has a very open design. That means easy cleaning, easy maintenance, easy service. The machine is very versatile and it is

a completely hygienic design. You only see sloped surfaces. There are no gaps where product could be hidden, we design according to the highest hygienic standards. The laser system which we installed is one of the most advanced on the market today. While the product is falling we inspect it from both sides simultaneously.

We can put up to sixteen lasers and thirty-two sensors in one sorter. This allows us to create multispectral laser sorting; we can combine so many wavelength combinations that we can gain extra information from the products. You can sort by colour, but at the same time you get structural and invisible info. The processing system will handle all the data at the same time. This may sound difficult to the user, but we have simplified the interface.

At the interface you can see the products going through the machine and you select the background and you determine what is your ‘good’ and your ‘bad’ product. It is as easy as I am telling you right now. It’s as easy as tuning a radio…

That was what you said some 20 years ago about the operation of LS9000.

You are right. But we go a little bit further. You don’t say: this product is good, this is bad. You say: this is a stone, a piece of shell, a piece of glass -- in other words – you classify defects. By classifying you can also gather the data of the product. Our customer knows the percentage of rejects, but also what kind of defects in the rejects like sticks, shells, stones, glass or mould. You can use that data to control other parts of equipment in the line. (if you see too many cap stems, go and adjust the de-stemmer…) On top of that we have a far higher resolution then what is existing on the market today. The polygon speed is now 20,000 rpm which in combination with our higher digitalization

rate creates an eight times higher resolution as former models. Every scan is less than one millimeter, and the scan as such is subdivided. The resolution is between 0.5 to 0.3 mm. Nothing else than revolutionary!

A typical problem in raisin sorting is capstems. The capstem’s thickness is roughly one millimeter, in our system it is visible by at least 3 pixel wide! Even if it is not fully exposed – you know, the embedded capstems -- we will detect the most of them.

In our 1200 mm wide Ventus we have 256 ejectors. Each ejector is only 4.6 mm away from the next one. This way we have very little loss of product.

We will not stop here, we are now in the process of creating different sizes of the Ventus, but important to say ; all with superior resolution.

©AgroPress 2019

©AgroPress 2019