'Bout the same way.
Cheapest, easiest, safest, most effective with smallest dollar investment. We use stainless steel bowls, colanders, etc from Goodwill, Value Village and similar.
Lots of cleaners to choose from. I like a strong caustic cleaner generally but not for aluminum.
Maybe warm water with agitation for better cleaning. Maybe an air knife for drying.
We have a similar operation for carbide parts. We do batches from maybe a handful to a quart in volume. Maybe 100 parts to 10,000. mayube .25” x .125” x .100” inches to .25” x 1” x 1”. We use tumbling barrels, rinse in colanders then dump on towels. The towels are Costco bath towels. We dump wet parts on them, rub them around on the towel and let them dry. We do have a shink wrap gun we use for faster drying when necessary.
We have tried a bunch of other things and used more and different equipment in times past.
If it was a big, ongoing project you could build a conveyor.