Abstract:

This article set forth the principles for automatically arranging and separating granules via an inclined turntable, the foundations of which had been established through the design and manufacture of a turntable-inclined scratch style photoelectric apparatus that could count granules or weigh up to 1 000 of them. The unorganized granules entered an inclined trough and onto a turntable, the bottom of which automatically migrated, sorted and arranged the granules into space from each other, to get the reliable light-trough gaps, at which point a photoelectric apparatus accurately preset, counted and verified the collection of granules. This type of instrument provided several advantages over other designs: (1) the counting mechanism is extremely precise, for every round, the preset counting error is less than 1-2 granules, and the re-examination counting error rate is less than 0.04%; (2) the counting speed is as high as 50 granules per second; (3)applicable to a wide range of diameters, from 0.5 mm to 18 mm;(4) No damaged seed is found during tests; (5) the structure is simple and reliable and there is no electromagnetic vibration or noise; (6) the principles underlying the device have a wide range of potential applications and exploitation beyond precise counting and sorting granules, especially for some devises need no-damage counting.

Key words: automatically count granules instrument, 1 000 seeds weight instrument, preset count, photoelectric count, granules feeding process automation, microcontroller programming and control