Wheat seeds separation in high-intensity electric field

The paper aims at demonstrating the feasibility of cleaning and sorting of wheat seeds in the corona field of roll-type and free fall separators. An extended corona discharge field was generated by three dual wire type electrodes in the roll-type separator and by a frame type corona electrode with nine horizontal emissive wires, in the free-fall separator. The separation feaseability was studied on samples of wheat, broken wheat, shrivelled wheat, barley, oat, wild oat (Avena fatua), and corncockle (Agrostemma githago) and on binary mixtures with equal number of seeds. The experiments show the possibility to clean the wheat seeds from oat, wild oat and corncokle. The sorting of a ternary mixture of wheat, broken and shrivelled wheat in order to increase germination presented better results on the roll-type separator. The sorting of a 600 grams conditioned wheat allowed to increase the thousand-seeds weight from 49.5 grams to 53.5 grams, at 42.6% mass recovery on the roll type corona separator.