Zhongde Color Sorter Assists in Upgrading the Chinese Herbal Medicine Industry: Precisely Sorting Astragalus to Enhance Medicinal Quality and Value
Hebei Xingtai, May 30, 2026
In the traditional Chinese herbal medicine processing sector, the purity and consistency of raw materials are critical factors determining product value and efficacy. Recently, Xingtai Zhongde Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. successfully deployed a high-precision color sorting solution customized for Chinese herbal medicines at a major domestic herbal decoction piece enterprise. The core equipment of this solution—the Zhongde Intelligent Chinese Herbal Medicine Color Sorter—has demonstrated exceptional performance in the refined sorting of Astragalus, marking a new stage of intelligence and standardization in the primary processing of Chinese medicinal materials.
Astragalus, a commonly used bulk medicinal material, often contains heterochromatic impurities in its raw form, such as incompletely removed rootlets, clods, stones, deteriorated slices, and non-medicinal parts. Traditional manual sorting methods are not only inefficient and costly but also struggle to ensure consistent and thorough sorting due to worker fatigue and subjective judgment differences. The Zhongde Intelligent Color Sorter put into operation this time deeply integrates the material characteristics of Astragalus, successfully overcoming these industry pain points.
The equipment is equipped with a multi-spectral recognition system and ultra-high-definition CCD visual sensors independently developed by Xingtai Zhongde Intelligent Technology. It can accurately capture multidimensional differences between Astragalus slices and various impurities in terms of color, shape, and even subtle texture. Even moldy slices with colors close to genuine products or tiny soil particles embedded in slice crevices can be quickly identified and located by the system. Combined with the company's proprietary adaptive algorithm, the machine can learn and optimize sorting parameters in real-time, ensuring sorting accuracy remains above 99.9% even with fluctuations in the characteristics of raw materials from different batches and origins.
In addition to its remarkable "vision," its "execution capability" is equally outstanding. The high-speed solenoid valve ejection system features a response time shortened to the microsecond level. During the dynamic flow of materials, it can instantly eject identified impurities with millimeter-level precision, minimizing the carry-over of good materials and effectively improving the yield of high-quality Astragalus products. Production data shows that after using this equipment, the purity of the enterprise's Astragalus raw materials has significantly improved, fully meeting and even exceeding the stringent requirements of the Chinese Pharmacopoeia and high-end markets.
The efficiency improvement is equally remarkable. A single Zhongde color sorter can process up to several thousand kilograms of raw materials per hour, equivalent to the continuous work of dozens of skilled laborers, and can operate stably 24/7 without interruption. This not only significantly reduces the enterprise's reliance on labor and overall production costs but also frees production personnel from monotonous repetitive tasks, allowing them to shift to higher-value positions in quality supervision and process management.
The project manager from Xingtai Zhongde Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. stated, "We are well aware that Chinese herbal medicines are special products related to national health. Their sorting requires not only precision but also a deep understanding and protection of material properties. While ensuring efficient impurity removal, our equipment maximizes the preservation of the Astragalus slices' morphological integrity and active ingredients through gentle channel design and low-damage ejection technology. This is difficult to achieve with generic equipment that merely pursues speed."
The successful application of the Zhongde Intelligent Color Sorter in Astragalus sorting provides a model for the intelligent upgrade of the entire Chinese herbal medicine processing industry. It can be used for the precise sorting of various root, fruit, and flower/leaf category herbs such as Angelica sinensis (Danggui), Lycium barbarum (Gouqizi), and Lonicera japonica (Jinyinhua). Its powerful recognition and learning capabilities can also adapt to the unique sorting needs of different medicinal materials.
Looking ahead, Xingtai Zhongde Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. will continue to delve into the field of intelligent sorting. Driven by continuous R&D and innovation, the company will deeply integrate more advanced optical technologies and artificial intelligence algorithms with industry processes. It aims to provide more professional, efficient, and reliable customized intelligent sorting solutions for clients across a wide range of global industries, including agricultural products, minerals, and renewable resources, assisting various sectors in achieving quality improvement, efficiency enhancement, and industrial upgrading.
