Key Technology COMPASS Optical Sorter for corn, peas and green beans

Key Technology has introduced its COMPASS optical sorter for fresh and frozen corn, peas and green beans. The unit is designed to deliver repeatable removal of foreign material (FM) and product defects across varied production requirements. It is available in belt-fed configurations for fresh applications and chute-fed configurations for IQF (individually quick frozen) products.

The unit can identify and remove a range of FM and product defects, including stones, sticks, plastic, metal and extraneous vegetable matter, as well as discoloured or damaged product and large ice or frozen agglomerates in IQF applications.

Features include sensing architecture which combines multi-channel sensor data and multi-wavelength strobing to generate up to eight streams of inspection data; and Key’s Pixel Fusion detection technology that uses visible and infrared data at the pixel level to further sharpen contrast for finding difficult-to-detect FM and product defects.

With a modular design, it is available in multiple sizes. Other features include faster changeovers and seamless transitions between SKUs through recipe-driven programming; and an open, washdown-ready hygienic design suitable for vegetable processing environments.

It also comes equipped with Key Discovery, an analytics and reporting software that collects, analyses and shares data that can be used to reveal trends in yield, reject rates, raw material variability and upstream performance.