ASABE Particle Separator

[Mechanical Rolling] [Computer Mouse Click] - [Voiceover] The American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, or ASABE, Particle Separator is the standard method for determining the particle size distribution of chopped forages.

It is a large machine that uses as fed samples.

It is accurate and does a very good job of separating samples with extremely long particles.

The ASABE Separator is heavy, large, and requires electricity to operate, which limits it to laboratory use.

In this video, Dr. Jud Heinrichs will demonstrate the use of the ASABE separator.

- Okay, this is a particle separator.

A foraging TMR particle separator. It was developed back in the 80s by the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers. It's really one of the classical particle separators that we've used for foraging TMR separation.

What it has is a large tray here where I can put sample.

It's close to two and a half gallons of as-fed material.

And, I'll show you in a minute where it separates.

I basically have a series of screens here.

They go all the way from very large screen, down to the smaller and smaller sizes, all the way to netting a 1.18 mm screen, and a pan in the bottom.

One of the critical things that this does, is it separates in a three dimensional manner.

These happen to be square holes, but the thickness of the material that it's passing through, that the forage is passing through, is proportional to the size of that hole.

So the thickness of the top screen is the greatest, and they get smaller and smaller as you go all the way down to the pan, with the 1.18 screen at the bottom.

So I put two and a half gallons of material in this.

It shakes in a two-dimensional manner.

There is no up-and-down shaking, but it shakes for a couple minutes in this two-dimensional manner so that you can gain an actual particle size of a Forager TMI.

After it's gone through its cycle, you can now weigh the material on each of those different pans.

It's a rather expensive piece of equipment, a rather heavy piece of equipment, and there aren't too many of them around in the world, but it is a classical way that I can define medium particle size and deviation around that, so when I'm doing some calculations in the lab or for some research experiments, it gives me very accurate data.

There are some forager labs around the world, there we can use it also to give you the Forager TMI particle size.