BeetBeater: waterless beet processing for biogas plants

BeetBeater: waterless beet processing for biogas plants
Damme, November-12, 2012 - The Grimme BeetBeater is the first system which works without water for a complete stone separation and preparation of sugar beet. This ensures an economic use of biogas processing all year round. Until today, traditional energy intense washing systems with poor output achieved a clean stone separation of sugar beet. The high creation of waste water becomes more and more of a problem concerning recycling. This has kept many bio gas plant farmers away from using sugar beet for their biogas plant.
 
The BeetBeater processes the beet directly before it enters the fermenter. The Receiving Hopper with its 20 m³ capacity receives ensilaged or fresh sugar beet. The cost effectice key is the ensilaged beet which enables the farmer to feed the biogas plant all the year round.

The Receiving Hopper transfers the sugar beet onto the roller table consisting of six 1.2 m wide PU coils with infinitely distance and speed adjustment. The roller table ensures the final beet cleaning of soil and trash separation and forwards it to the turnstile. Sugar beet and remaining stones are lined up in a tray, with 2 axial rollers at the bottom and plain rollers at the side. Forwarded from the tray the beet and stones are transfered onto the patented* stone separator KEinstein (meaning no stones). This accustic system detects stones and beet and flips the stones out of the crop flow within seconds. Stopping of the machine for stone separation becomes unnecessary and only sugar beet is fed to the crumble rotor.

Heavy duty crumble rotors cut the sugar beet into small matchbox sized chips, thus allowing a fast processing of the microorganisms in the biogas plant. For safety reasons an extra stone protection has been fitted to the crumble rotor. Should a stone pass into the crumble rotor it would block the cutter. Immediately the beet feeding stops, reversing of the rotor starts and transfers the stone through a stone flap out of the beet flow. Then automatically the beet flow starts again.