Aerosort Enters Green Leaf Market

Source from:  Tobacco Reporter 06/27/2011

Hauni says its Aerosort NTRM removal system performed well during a recent cross-industry test (CIT) at Universal Leaf Tobacco Co.'s tobacco processing plant in Nash county, North Carolina, USA. The machine's innovative camera technology and air separator identified every imaginable type of nontobacco related material with an average hit rate of 85.6 percent and then removed the unwanted materials. In some cases, the efficiency achieved was considerably higher than the average value. In each CIT, the objective was to remove 10 x 10 specific foreign bodies that had been added to 50 kg of tobacco. These included CIT seeds designed to resemble feathers, plastic film, pieces of wood and erasers as well as particles of plastic, paper and aluminum foil. The new Aerosort had to identify and remove them. The Aerosort 1800 also scored well in terms of its false detection rate-achieving a rate of 1.85 percent, which was below the pre-specified limit of 2 percent without using the rerun function. All the tests were performed using Burley tobacco, which is considered a particularly demanding material due to its comparatively low weight. Later this summer, the Aerosort 1800 will be tested at Universal Leaf with Virginia tobacco. Hauni's staff is confident about the results. In a previous test conducted at a European customer's factory using Virginia tobacco at a throughput of 9 tons per hour, the Aerosort achieved an efficiency of 87 percent and a false detection rate of 1.85 percent without using the rerun function. Enditem