Comparison of process flow alternatives for soybean seed cleaning. There has been considerable debate regarding the effectiveness of different combinations of machinery for cleaning soybean seed. The traditional setup involved running an air-screen cleaner, spiral separator, gravity table, and a color sorter. These days, some facilities are use only a cleaner and a color sorter. This has been driven by the development of high-capacity RGB color sorters with optical shape sorting capabilities. Enclosed rotary spirals (or “rotary sorters”) are another option that provides substantially more control over the discard level for removing oblong or shriveled seed. This project aims to provide data that compare the performance of four equipment combinations involving a rotary sorter, gravity table, and/or color sorter on two seed lots of different varieties from different production regions. Results are expected to inform conditioning machinery selection and plant design discussions.
