Home Physical Sciences A novel micro-spiral pneumatic selection system for the separation of fresh tea leaves
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A novel micro-spiral pneumatic selection system for the separation of fresh tea leaves

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Published/Copyright: April 23, 2021

Abstract

There are no standard machines or systems used for grading the new tea leaves in the market, a micro-spiral pneumatic selection system was designed to separate fresh tea leaves, solving the difficulties in tea leaf selecting and separation. The system can flexibly separate the tea leaves continuously in high quality. And the simulation model was established based on the experiments results to optimize the design parameters. The maximum constant air flow rate separation tests showed that the symmetrical distribution effect of six tubular fans provided better balance than four tubular fans, and three grades of fresh tea can be differentially sorted. Additionally, solid particle simulation tests showed that separation begins at heights between 0.27 and 0.37 m. When the air flow rates range from 4.4 to 6.6 m/s, fresh tea leaves containing only one leaf per stem are well separated from multi-leaf containing stems. Furthermore, solid particle simulation tests indicated that different sizes of fresh tea leaves can be distributed in corresponding annular regions of specific widths; therefore, the flow field simulation tests showed that an optimized system could separate tea leaves according to the number of leaves on the stem. To sum, this study reported a novel micro-spiral pneumatic selection system with high efficiency for the separation of fresh tea leaves.


Corresponding author: Chuanyu Wu, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering & Automation, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, Hangzhou, 310018 Zhejiang, China, E-mail:

Award Identifier / Grant number: 51975537

  1. Author contributions: All the authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this submitted manuscript and approved submission.

  2. Research funding: This study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC 51975537).

  3. Conflict of interest statement: The authors declare no conflicts of interest regarding this article.

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Received: 2020-09-08
Accepted: 2021-04-06
Published Online: 2021-04-23

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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