Research on the development of sorting device for quality inspection of corbicula shell

Abstract

In general, manual sorting carries out for the quality inspection of corbicula shells prior to shipment. The inspection worker drops each corbicula shells on the concrete floor, and a shell is assessed as good or bad by the sound of collision with floor. The corbicula shell containing mud or nothing is specified as a bad corbicula. This manual sorting process is time consuming and laborious. In addition, this process is often prone to mistakes. In order to overcome the problem of manual sorting, an inspection probe has been developed. The inspection probe assesses a corbicula shell as good or bad by detecting the transmitted light spectra, and it has been tested that the probe can detect good and bad corbicula shells with an accuracy of 100%. Thereafter, a quality sorting device with the inspection probe has been developed for the commercial use. A laboratory based experiments have been conducted first to evaluate the performance of developed quality sorting device. The test results showed that the sorting device can sort shells with an accuracy of about 99%. Subsequently, a comprehensive evaluation experiment have also been carried out, and the experimental results showed that our developed sorting device is able to sort corbicula shells with an accuracy of 98.6%. This results implies that the present quality sorting device is ready to use for commercial sorting of corbicula shells

Keywords

• corbicula
• quality inspection
• non-destructive quality inspection
• integrating sphere
• optical method