The funding sum of over 1.9 million euros is being used to set up a plant technology center for the development of recycling-friendly pre-treatment strategies for plastics recycling, ReVor for short.
The aim of ReVor is to set up a semi-industrial plant technology center as a real laboratory in which complex plastic components and material composites from technical applications are pretreated so that they can be recycled. These include, for example, plastic-metal composites, the shredder light fraction of end-of-life vehicles or electronic scrap from old electronic and electrical equipment (E&E), composites such as glass fiber reinforced plastics (GRP), including from wind turbine rotor blades, or various plastic waste from the construction sector such as insulation materials, etc., for all of which there are currently no satisfactory recycling solutions.
The proposed research infrastructure should consist of various specific, modular, semi-industrial processing stages and plant components that can be flexibly connected in series and, if necessary, cascaded in any order.
If we want to produce high-quality post-consumer recyclates in the future, a multivariable and currently unique pilot plant of this type is the basic prerequisite. From a recycling technology perspective, it enables the development of optimized pre-treatment strategies and process parameters for the separation, cleaning and separation of various components or materials and is unique in the research and industrial landscape in this form for the development of processing strategies.
The development of input-specific pre-treatment strategies for more complex components in recycling technology is the necessary “key factor” for the recycling of previously non-recyclable technical components from the above-mentioned applications. This is the only way to meet the market demand for higher-quality post-consumer recyclates in the field of engineering plastics in the coming years, also in view of the stricter legal regulations.
For example, the effective separation of ferrous and non-ferrous metals from the shredder light fraction from the automotive sector or the E&E sector is heavily dependent on the size and design of the components and the particles and leads to different results at different points in the pre-treatment process. The various density separation processes must also be further developed in order to be able to separate technical plastics in a targeted manner. Spectroscopic separation processes with different mechanisms of action for separating the plastic fractions are further important process steps that are used at different points in the treatment process or are sometimes run through several times.
The process parameters themselves include, for example, the speed, the material throughputs or the screen hole size of the shredding units, the temperatures used or the surfactants during washing, the wetting behavior of the separation medium and the separation medium itself or the resulting density cuts in the float-sink separation, the particle size or sensitivity in the various spectroscopic separation processes, as well as the sequence and repetition of the various process steps.
In addition to the flexibility of the modularly interconnectable process stages, the semi-industrial scale for input-specific pre-treatment is a key unique selling point of the project's plant technology center. For new input streams, it is currently only possible to use existing industrial treatment and recycling plants. However, the development of treatment processes for new input streams often fails due to the required quantities of input streams, the contamination of the plants with preliminary products, the lack of flexibility of the processes with regard to the process steps and process parameters and the lack of possibilities for quality assessment of the effectiveness of the respective intermediate stages.
