Once upon a time, your options for sorting the wheat from the chaff were limited. You could either to do it by hand, hopefully with plenty of help from employees, friends, or family, or you used a blanket to throw the wheat into the air, allowing the wind to carry the lighter chaff away. As you can imagine, this wasted a lot of wheat.
This technique has been used for other materials as well, such as rice. Heavier materials, like gold, silver, and other precious metals, often had to be separated from equally heavy materials; the wind wasn’t about to carry away granite, limestone, and mud. Many prospectors used water and sieves to wash away dirt and smaller pebbles, hoping to get at the valuable metals scattered about in rivers, mountains, and caves.
Thankfully, we no longer have to rely on these primitive, inconsistent, and unreliable methods of separation. Modern science has brought us the tools to quickly and easily sort through a whole mess of materials, cutting down on labor costs and materials waste. What is this marvel of modern technology, you may ask? Why, it’s vibrations.
Ancient Vibrations
Okay, vibration isn’t exactly new; it’s been around, oh, since the dawn of time. The trick is harnessing vibrations to sort through materials, however. These days, whether you’re working in a quarry or in agriculture, machines that are capable of producing vibrations are used in combination with sheets that contain holes or slats in them. The vibrations shake whatever is on top of the sheet, causing some things to fall through the holes in the sheet while other objects remain above the sheet.
Typically speaking, smaller undesirables fall through those slats, while what you want – well, most of what you want – remains atop the sheet. This is in fact not that different from the system used by the ‘49ers during the gold rush, only with machines to do all the work for you, and on an industrial scale as well.
The type of sheet used can be changed depending on the materials you are working with. In fact, many vibratory sorting machines employ a large amount of customization and interchangeability, allowing them to be adjusted to suit any sorting need you may have. We have come a long way since winnowing.
New Vibrations
In agriculture, you have the aforementioned rice and wheat sorted using vibrations, but all crops that are mass harvested must be sent through some sort of sorting process, lest you sell stalk, root, and vine along with your product – which is pretty expensive when it comes to transportation.
To save money, vintners use sorting machines to sort through their harvest. Grapes remain above the sheet, while seeds, vines, leaves, dirt, and anything else they don’t want in the wine-making process is separated away. These days, most agricultural products see a similar treatment. There are just too many of us to feed to take the time to sort through every fruit and vegetable.
The earth pulled out of quarries is also separated through quarries. Thanks to precision-crafted slotted sheets, any size and shape metal or rock can be sorted out from the unwanted dirt and debris that comes with quarrying. You can save time, effort, manpower, and most importantly money with this modern adaptation of an ancient technique.
About Author:
T.M. Loyd is a freelance writer from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who has been published across the web on topics ranging from landscaping to aggregate mining companies like Kemper Equipment. He is schooled in finance, international relations, literature, consumer issues, and education, among many, many other disciplines.
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