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Made in Washington - Key Technology: Sorting made simple |
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Written On: July/August 2006 |
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Written By: by Ron Dalby |
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Consider the ubiquitous pea. Unassuming and small, it’s not really notable for its size or its color—or anything else, for that matter. It is, however, a regularly featured vegetable on tables across the United States and much of the rest of the world. Most of us only know the pea as one of many that may come in a can or a bag from the grocery store. It was, however, the impetus for creating an international manufacturing company.
How, you ask? Well, somebody has to grow that pea—tons of peas if he or she is to make a living as a pea farmer. Now, think in terms of how many peas there might be in a ton of peas. For a successful pea farmer with many tons of peas, billions of peas are not at all unrealistic. Now you begin to get a glimpse of the problem that the founders of Walla Walla-based Key Technology, Inc. set out to solve.
Peas grow on vines and mechanical pickers do much of the harvesting work, ultimately leaving the farmer with truckloads of peas. Mixed in with those peas, however, are bits and pieces of vines, insects, pods, dirt and gravel; even, occasionally, bits of various critters like snakes that once lived in the pea fields. The problem then becomes one of scale—separating billions of peas from the bits and pieces of residue that no one wants to find in a can or bag of peas at the grocery store.
As mind-boggling as this task may seem, separating the good stuff from the bad is probably the easiest part of the harvest process, thanks to Key Technology.
"Food is still the vast majority of our customer base," said Gordon Wicher, Key Technology’s senior vice president and general manager for America and Asia.
Key Technology’s main product lines include automated inspection systems for all kinds of food and non-food applications; processing systems, primarily vibrating conveying equipment; and parts and service for existing machines," ... a very fast-growing part of our business," said Wicher.
Wicher takes pride in showing visitors around the Walla Walla production facility. When it comes to machines for scanning, sorting and separating, the equipment he demonstrates and the people he introduces in a few short minutes will make a believer out of even the most jaded skeptic. The machines this company produces work well and the people who produce the machines are a talented team.
Key Technology is now an international company with facilities in Australia and the Netherlands in addition to Redmond and Medford, Ore., and the company headquarters in Walla Walla. About 500 people work for the company, more than 60 percent of them in Washington.
Background
It wasn’t always this way, though. Claude and Lloyd Key, along with Francis Miller, founded Key Equipment Co. in 1948 in Milton-Freewater, Ore. Their goal was to build and sell equipment for food processing and agriculture. They built more than $100,000 worth of machinery the first year, focusing primarily on the region’s booming pea-farming industry. Corn and lima beans were two other areas of interest. A leased packing shed and 12 workers comprised the entire company. A model of one of the earliest machines made for the pea fields is now on display in the lobby of their Walla Walla facility.
Key Equipment grew rapidly in the early 1950s, forcing several moves to bigger quarters in Milton-Freewater. The company began reaching out to international markets in the 1970s and 1980s, and the move to Walla Walla came in 1990.
"We wanted to stay in the same general area," Wicher said. "We were able to work a pretty good deal with the Port of Walla Walla. We don’t think Washington is a bad place to do business at all."
State-of-the-art equipment
Key Technology sells 75 to 100 optical imaging systems every year, as well as several hundred vibrating conveyor systems. Put these items together and you have an awesome piece of gear for scanning and sorting virtually anything that can be sent down the conveyor belt—from foods and medicines to hardware.
Peas, pills, shrimp—or whatever—are sent down the vibrating conveyor belt toward the optical scanner. The belt vibrates as a means of separating everything down to a single layer so the scanner can properly evaluate the size, shape and color of each individual item.
From the vibrating conveyor, the items land on a regular conveyor belt that whisks them past a scanner. The scanner is preset by the operator to determine acceptable sizes, colors, shapes and other parameters. If the scanner detects something outside of the established parameters, it signals a computer, which in turn causes one or more of hundreds of air jets to squirt a burst of air onto the offending piece just as it is flying off the end of the conveyor belt toward the container for the good product. This tiny jet of air redirects the flight of the defective item downward into a separate bin for disposal without altering the path of the good product. All of this takes place in the blink of an eye.
For demonstration purposes, Wicher and Applications Engineer Ken Carambot have about a bushel of bright orange DayQuil® tablets. Mixed in with the tablets, though, are a handful of misshapen tablets, pills of differing shapes and colors, and other things consumers are not likely to appreciate in their medicine bottles.
Carambot rapidly dumps the entire bushel onto the vibrating conveyor and in less than 10 seconds all of the bad items have been directed to the trash bin and the container at the foot of the machine holds nothing but appropriately shaped and colored pills. This machine, the Optyx Raptor®, operates so fast that it’s almost impossible to spot the offending items being cast aside.
Some of the machines do more than just sort. The french fry industry processes potatoes year round, and obviously needs a means to sort. It also can use a machine that can treat an individual french fry and correct deficiencies. Key Technology has created a piece of equipment to fit the bill. As the french fries pass under the scanner, computer signals noting a bad spot are passed down to another, different kind of conveyor device. In this final conveyor, a knife pops out at just the right moment and excises the bad spot so the bulk of the potato slices can continue on to market.
Using the technology
Setting up one of these machines with the necessary parameters takes about 90 minutes, according to Carambot. Key Technology provides both operator and technician training. It generally takes only a couple of hours to train an operator in the field, and perhaps three or four days to train a technician at the plant.
Software for the scanners is currently available in five languages: English, German, French, Spanish and Italian. A Japanese version will be available soon. "We do about 50 percent of our business outside the United States," Wicher notes.
Though components are procured from other companies, all of Key Technology’s machines are built in-house, from the stainless steel sheets that are bent and welded into place, all the way up to the complex electrical panels that make up the heart of each device.
Jobs in this plant are high-wage manufacturing jobs that require considerable skill and knowledge. This is not a mind-numbing, assembly line operation. It is a group of highly skilled, motivated and dedicated people developing and building machines that make agriculture—as well as other applications requiring high-speed sorting—much more efficient.
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