Cimbria Heid Indented Cylinder Separator - Why Less is More?

The Cimbria Heid Indent Separator looks a lot different than its competitors here in North America. Every time I speak with someone about it they are shocked at the size of them. This is always followed by a “well that makes sense why you only need two as compared to six, nine or twelve” comment, which is why my introduction always begins with, “we can do more with less”.

The Cimbria Heid Indent is capable of processing up to 16 Tonnes per hour through only two cylinders. Instead of using a top cylinder to split as many machines do to get higher capacities out the gate, we can accomplish desired capacities in most scenarios by using the top cylinder to pick the short, small, broken, chips or rounds and then pass all of the good product to the bottom cylinder to be lifted out of the longer material.

So what are the advantages with only using two cylinders? The most prevalent I find is that you have less machines to adjust, there is one cylinder doing all of your short separations so one trough and cylinder speed adjustment instead of multiples. As well as one cylinder doing our long separation, so again only one trough and cylinder as well as retarder adjustments instead of multiples. This also completely removes the need to have a splitting cylinder up top and trying to set that to a 50/50 split accurately can be challenging. This is compounded in that you can feed all of your seed flow into one cylinder, rather than having to split evenly into multiple cylinders and then doing a 50/50 split to the short and long cylinders. If you are feeding a set of nine indents that means that you are initially splitting your flow three ways and then each of those is then split into a short and long. The odds that you are evenly running each cylinder becomes more and more of a challenge.

There also comes advantages in the size of the Cimbria Cylinders. When we look at the physics of how an indent operates this becomes clearer. In essence we have a cylinder with pockets that is rotating in a circle, the premise being that we want each pocket to pick up something. That item then travels up until it is nearly upside down and has to fall out. With a larger cylinder we are giving ourselves a larger window for that seed to fall out at the correct time. Let's take a short separation for example; we have a small broken kernel we are trying to lift out of larger good seed. As that travels up it sits in the pocket nicely while the larger seed not being fully embedded will fall out sooner. Our goal is to have all of the good seed fall out before it rises over the trough and have all of the smaller brokens to travel past the trough lip and then fall into the trough to be removed. So with a larger diameter cylinder this window we are looking at becomes larger and therefore an easier separation to attain.

The last thing that customers find attractive with the Cimbria Indent is the ability to clean it out. It already has less pipes and fittings to deal with going in so there will inherently be less places for seed to get hung up. But the real ticket on these indents is that the side of the indent has a door that can be rolled up and the internal segments are in four sections. This allows our customers to open up the indent segment itself to do a physical cleanout and inspection and guarantee 100% that there aren't any foreign seeds inside to contaminate the next lot. The ability to do this in ten minutes is what really attracts customers who want to guarantee the quality to their patrons.

So in conclusion, we have three things that really stand out with the Cimbria Heid Indent Separator.