Analytical Research Laboratories Ltd (ARL) is New Zealand’s leading soil, plant, feed, water and fertiliser analytical laboratory. Intellitech have worked with ARL to develop an innovative soil sieving and grinding machine.
Sieving of fresh soil samples takes place before sample drying and can be very labour intensive. This step normally involves a person manually pushing the sample through a perforated stainless-steel plate, and serves to break up the sample before drying, and remove rocks and roots from the soil. It also should produce a representative sub-sample, as not all the soil provided needs to be tested.
Grinding of soil samples takes place after the drying stage, and is normally either a manual process (using a sieve and pestle), or a noisy and dusty process.
The new machine developed is capable of performing both the sieving and grinding stages, with a simple change-over between the two modes.
