After being sorted into larger cardboard totes or metal bins, the packages that will be transported by surface mode are loaded on to trailers to be trucked to their destination. For packages that will get air transport, sacks get sealed up and brought to another part of the facility where they are weighed and scanned.
In less than a second, a large database of airline routes is checked to determine the most efficient route, and then a computer prints out a label, which looks just like a luggage tag.
Some parcels will fly in the cargo hold of passenger flights, while others go on cargo airlines. Employees unload packages from bins and face their barcodes up. This would come with a huge advantage because packages will be sorted by carrier route instead of just by post office.
Currently, once each cart reaches the destination post office, another employee then sorts the packages for each individual route. Depending on the volume, this process can take 6 to 8 hours. For the busier offices, employees start their shift around 2 a. The current process of sorting packages to post offices is tedious, and there are several opportunities for errors. Mail arriving at this facility could be sorted by the first two or three digits of the zip code.
For packages destined for the city of Seattle, which is all zip codes beginning with , an employee unloads packages from carts and then places them on to one of six conveyor belts.
Under the action of the LED light source, according to the intensity and color change of the light, the output signal of the system is driven to drive the solenoid valve to blow the heterochromatic particles into the waste outlet hopper, and the accepted material continues to fall to the finished product cavity of the acceptation outlet hopper.
In order to achieve the purpose of color sorting. The main components of the color sorter are feed hopper, vibrating feeder, chute, light source, background plate, CCD lens, outlet hopper, nozzle, air compressor, air tank, and filter.
It consists of feeding hopper, vibrating feeder, and chute. Raw material enters into vibrating feeder from the feeding hopper, then automatically be arranged into a series of continuous current line by vibration and a guiding mechanism, and fall to a detection zone at a constant speed after being accelerated by the chute.
The feeding system also controls the capacity of the color sorting machine in addition to the function of providing raw material. T through the adjustment of the vibration amount of the feed hopper flow control plate and the vibration hopper, the control of the output of the color sorter per unit time can be realized. The Optoelectronic system is the core part of the color sorting machine, which is mainly composed of an LED light source, background plate, CCD lens, and related auxiliary devices.
The light source provides stable uniform illumination of the material being tested and the background plate. Nevertheless, the facer-cancellers were seen as a large improvement over the old cancelling machines, and they were a crucial part of the mechanization and modernization program of the Post Office Department.
However, there continued to be some issues with the machines. Because of the optical sensing device used to locate the stamps and the possible inability to do so because of a lack of contrast, the machine had a high rejection rate of twelve to fourteen percent. The production rate was seen as being lower than it should be, but it was increasing over time.
For the first couple of years of service, there was an irregular mail flow from the machines, but this problem was solved early on. The next development in the evolution of the facer-canceller machine was to change the sensing device from being able to distinguish color contrasts to being able to detect stamps that were tagged with luminescent substances. Experiments had initially been conducted with an 8 cent tagged air mail stamp.
The tagged stamp, when hit by the ultraviolet light that was produced by the NCR Mark II Facer-Canceller machine, would glow green, which the machine would be able to sense. While this machine could not process the letter mail much faster than its predecessor, processing 30, letters an hour, the rejection rate was much lower with the new machine.
The stamp tagging program greatly improved the rate of letters that would be able to be processed by facer-cancellers. The error rate with the previous Mark II Facer-Cancellers that used the optical contrast technique for sensing the stamps was approximately Facer-cancellers were a vital part of the mechanization program of the Post Office Department because of the manual handling that could be eliminated by the use of such machines.
Though the letters that passed through the machines would have to be manually faced and canceled, this was still a vast improvement on all the mail being manually processed. Mail-Flo The Post Office Department, in its desire to mechanize as much of the mail processing as possible, developed a system of conveyor belts that could be placed in larger post offices to eliminate as much manual handling and carrying of mail as possible. The idea was that such a system would reduce strain on workers and the number of employees needed, while also speeding up mail processing within post office facilities.
The first Mail-Flo system was installed in the Detroit post office, and utilized conveyors that would operate automatically to move the mail within the post office. By the Detroit post office increased the use of the Mail-Flo system to cover both incoming and outgoing mail.
The installation by the Post Office Department was a large step towards eliminating the human element as much as possible in the moving of the mail and letting career postal employees perform less manual labor of lifting and carrying.
At the end of and the beginning of the main Washington, D. The Post Office Department further planned on installing the Mail-Flo system in eight total major post offices. The total length of the Mail-Flo system in all of the installations together would be approximately , feet, which is about 50 miles of conveyor belts. The plan to double the amount of post offices that had Mail-Flo systems running in them started in The team found that the systems would have to be reevaluated because before and after cost studies of the systems showed that they cost more than had previously been thought to run.
The Mail-Flo system would therefore have to become more efficient before it would be placed in other post offices undergoing mechanization refurbishments. Parcel Sorting Machine Because of their larger size, most parcels had to be dealt with by hand during mail processing.
The parcel sorting machine, helped to reduce the manual work that it took to process parcels. The first parcel sorting machines were controlled by operators that sorted parcels by keying their destinations into the machine. The main difference that was tested was the method that the operators used to help the machines sort the parcels. The initial machine was done by operating a keyboard, but a possible advancement of the machine was switching to one that could be operated by hearing spoken commands from operators.
One reason for this was because of the extreme variety that came in parcel sizes compared to the sizes of letter mail. The first parcel sorting machine was placed in the Baltimore post office for testing as one of the earlier machines that was tested by the Post Office Department.
The total weight for the machine was tons. While the potential ability of the machine to sort parcels much faster than only using manual methods, the machine was not always used as efficiently as possible.
The reporting group concluded that the machines should be used more to further reduce spending on labor. A separate machine for sorting unusually sized items such as small parcels and rolled newspapers was designed in August However, it was concluded in May that such a machine, which was separate from the main parcel sorter was uneconomical because hand sorting of such a large variety of sized mail would be less expensive.
An experimental machine was designed for testing for sorting flats in In there were 21 parcel sorting machines that were installed in post offices or under contract for installation. By placing strips of magnetic material in the bottom of each mail tray, it was found that such signals could be reliably recorded and read.
Letter Sorting Machine Because so much of mail processing is sorting, the Post Office Department wanted to develop letter sorting machines that would mechanically or automatically process the mail.
Several types of sorting machines were designed, from ones which an operator would key in a code which would send the letter to a destination box to machines that automatically read addresses and sort them into boxes.
Although the POD started studying the idea of a letter sorting machine in , no real work could be done on such a machine until postal budgets and the will to modernize increased after the Second World War. In it was stated in the POD annual report than mechanical sorting machines would be running experimentally the next year.
The machines would be able to make between and separations a division used in sorting mail — state, city, ZIP Code, house number, etc. In the first American-built letter sorting machine was debuted by the Burroughs Corporation. This machine could be used in smaller post offices. There were essentially two different types of mechanized sorting machines. The first was a keysort machine.
An operator would read an address and sort the letter by pressing a memorized key pattern for the address. The second was the codesort machine. At these machines, operators would not have to memorize a pattern, but would key in codes based on addresses.
One large letter sorting machine was 78 feet long and weighed 15 tons. The difference between letter sorting machines and manually sorting the mail was vast. Although the letter sorting machine was eventually more efficient, there were studies early on in the development of sorting machines that showed that manual sorting was still more cost effective than the machines.
Optical Character Recognition The Post Office Department had high hopes for optical character recognition, which the Department hoped could eliminate the majority of the human element from sorting mail.
Instead of postal workers reading the addresses and sorting the pieces of mail accordingly, machines would be able to automatically read the addresses and sort the mail without the need of an operator.
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