Plastic Pipes Conference Association # 2023 Lake Buena Vista
Márton Bredács, Jutta Geier, Mario Messiha, Gernot Oreski, Gerald Koinig, Raphael Horvath, Szilveszter Gergely, Gerald Pinter
In 2020, the global plastics production was 367 million tons. In Europe 20 % was used in the building and construction sector to manufacture in significant proportion polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP) pipes [1]. To increase the current 30 % recycling rate, it is crucial to improve the quality of recyclates and consequently facilitate the production of high-quality recycled products such as pipes. Previous studies [2, 3] have shown that improved mechanical sorting of post-consumer plastics will allow higher recyclate content in polyolefin (PO) pipes.
The characteristics of overtone vibrations recorded by the state of the art near infrared (NIR) sensors limit the sorting degree and depth of mechanical sorting lines. Thus, the objectives of this work are to improve the current NIR sorting technology by applying multivariate data analysis and to investigate the applicability of dual comb spectroscopy in the mid-IR spectral range as a new sensor technology in mechanical recycling. Using Principal Component Analysis (PCA), the separation of various virgin high-density PE and virgin PP grades was found to be possible, resulting in a higher degree of sorting for postconsumer PO products with NIR sensors. In fact, PCA of post-consumer PO indicates that processing method (e.g., extrusion, injection molding) based separation is possible. Moreover, PE density can be accurately predicted with partial least squares regression (PLS) relying on Raman and FTIR spectroscopy [3]. Although the current NIR spectra are not suitable for MFR and density prediction during the sorting process, an emerging new method applying dual comb spectroscopy provides high spectral resolution [4] and allows the accurate prediction of MFR and density of PE. In-line MFR and density prediction based on mid-IR spectroscopy could lead to recycled fractions containing only PE pipe grades. Such an enhancement would be a significant step towards increased plastics recycling and towards circular plastic pipe products.
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