Powder and granule inspection apparatus
AssigneeHajime Industries Ltd.
InventorKatsumi Tokoyama
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A sample of powder granules flowing through an online conveyor is removed periodically and fed to a supply hopper where a predetermined amount of granules are stored. A small portion of the granules are removed from the supply hopper and continuously fed to the upper surface of a rotary table to form a single layer thereon. The sample on the table is optically sensed to detect foreign particles. The foreign particles are removed and subsequently the good particles are removed and passed to a weighing hopper. The ratio of good product after sensing and the sample in the hopper is calculated to determine the relative amount of foreign particles flowing in the system.
Claims6
A powder granule inspection apparatus for sampling powder granules flowing through an online tube having means for removing a sample of said powder granules by a sampling nozzle, means for automatically inspecting for foreign particles contained in said sampled powder granules and means for removing such foreign particles, if any, comprising:
- a) a supply hopper for continuously storing at least a predetermined amount of powder granules sampled by said sampling nozzle;
- b) a feeder device for cutting out a small amount of powder granules from said supply hopper and continuously feeding the cut-out powder granules onto an upper surface of a the rotary table in the form of a single layer;
- c) a photosensing device for optically viewing and detecting the foreign particles contained in said sampled powder granules that are loaded onto the rotary table surface;
- d) a foreign particle remover for removing the foreign particles from the rotary table surface;
- e) a good product remover for removing the powder granules from which the foreign particle has been removed from the rotary table surface;
- f) a weighing hopper for temporarily storing a desired amount of the powder granules that have been removed by said good product remover;
- and
- g) means for maintaining said predetermined amount of powder granules in said supply hopper such that said predetermined amount of powder granules in said supply hopper is selected to be slightly larger than the amount of powder granules cutout by said feeder device, and the sampled amount of powder granules removed by said sampling nozzle is selected to be larger than the amount of powder granules cutout by said feeder device.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.