Sorting Things Out
Have you ever had to sort coins? Or separate lots of game or LEGO™ pieces by size or color? When you only have a few, it's easy to simply sort them by hand. But the more pieces you have, the more challenging sorting becomes.
Imagine trying to sort thousands of items by size in just a few minutes! Many produce growers have just that problem. Foods like potatoes, tomatoes, tree fruits, nuts, and berries have different uses and prices depending on their size. Growers rely on mechanical sorters to quickly divide a large crop into groups that can then be processed or sold separately. The video below shows just such a machine sorting mandarin oranges. As the oranges move through the machine, fruits drop into bins designated for specific sizes.
Shifting Through Everything
Have you ever used a kitchen sifter to separate small grains of flour or sugar from larger clumps? That same process is used on a larger scale to sort large quantities of aggregate material into separate groups. Aggregate describes a material that is a mixture of particles that are different sizes.
The earth resources industry deals with a lot of aggregate material. Mining ore, for example, is a mixture of rock, gravel, sand, and mineral particles. The energy required to retrieve valuable metals and minerals from the ore can vary with the size of the material. So it is more efficient to sort it prior to processing. It takes large machines capabable of moving heavy material to do this.
Here's a large sorting machine that quickly separates aggregate material into 3 separate piles based on size. Image found on For Construction Pros website.
Sorting and screening machines greatly improve industrial efficiency since they use mechanical processes to sort materials in significantly less time than humans can manually.