For cracking walnuts are used improvised means, manual, electric or industrial walnut crackers. Regardless of the method of splitting, after cracking the walnut must be processed – to separate the kernel from the shells and partitions. This process takes quite a lot of time and effort, and in the case of industrial volumes – requires money to pay staff.
In home conditions, when walnuts are cracked with manual walnut-crackers, the bulkhead is done manually. For example, at work nutcracker Whole kernel for one hour of work the person splits about 15 kg of a nut, the rest of the time is engaged in sorting.
*Depending on the speed of work, a person sorts out about 17 kg of cracked walnuts in 8 hours
If it is a family or small business in the processing of walnuts, which involved several people, the process is organized differently – one person splits the walnut with a walnut cracker, and 4 handlers perform sorting – separate the kernel from the shell and sort the kernel by size or color.
Productivity of electric nutcrackers is more than 50 kg/h, it is problematic to sort such quantity of walnuts manually. Therefore, to accelerate and facilitate sorting use aspiration column. It blows all light particles – shells, partitions and dust into the bag. The kernel is sent to a separate container. Depending on the quality of the walnut, the aspiration column can perform up to 90% of the work to separate the kernel from the shell.
Aspiration columns can also be used in industrial volumes, but their use is justified only if the capacity of the line is up to 100 kg per hour. At larger volumes and for automated processing vibrating screens with installed aspiration system are used. These installations simultaneously and sort the kernel in size (into fractions) and separate the kernel from shells, partitions and debris.
Vibrating screens are selected depending on the volume of processing – for 200, 300, 500 and more kilograms of walnuts per hour.