PETpla.net Insider 10 / 2018

MATERIALS / RECYCLING PET planet Insider Vol. 19 No. 10/18 www.petpla.net 10 Sorting solutions for bottles as well as for flakes Flakes flying by Do you remember Byron Geiger, a PET recycler from Alabama we reported on in PETplanet Vol. 06/2018 who is really struggling with poorly sorted PET material? His problems could be solved by the sorting technologies presented by National Recovery Technologies (NRT) which promise sorting rates higher in speed and efficiency as well as less human interference in the sorting process itself. Interview with National Recovery Technologies (NRT) April 4, 2018 We met: Mr Travis Curtis, Outside Sales Manager NRT, located in Nashville, Tennes- see, is an equipment manufacturing and engineering company specialised in sorting solutions for the recycling industry. The merger with Bulk Han- dling Systems (BHS) in 2012 now allows NRT to offer fully integrated solutions for the sorting of waste, from household single stream waste to precisely sorted components. Sorting bottles In order particularly to improve the recycling of PET, NRT developed an advanced infrared sorting system, NRT SpydIR, which separates numer- ous polymers and composite materials from a mixed stream. In this process NRT uses its In-Flight Sorting technol- ogy, one of its numerous patents in this field. Typically, the items are car- ried over a belt. Once they pass the end of the belt the ejection system of compressed air ejects foreign items. The difference between ordinary over- the-belt sorting and In-Flight Sorting is the point in time of detection through near infrared spectrometry. As already indicated by the names of the tech- nologies, this happens either on the belt or directly in flying motion immedi- ately before the ejection. The latter technology allows for a significant improvement in the sorting result due to the decreased time gap between detection and ejection. Hence, the risk of unpredictable movements of the items between these two steps and errors associated is thereby reduced. Furthermore, interferences on the belt no longer have any impact on the detection performance. Last but not least, In-Flight Sorting enables not only reflective but also transmissive detection allowing for the detection of thin-wall, wet and full-sleeve labelled PET. In order to enhance this effect NRT SpydIR is additionally equipped with the PET Boost technology using algorithms to boost weak detection signals. Sorting flakes Additionally, since 2015, NRT and Buhler Sortex, a member of the Bühler group, have joined forces in order to combine top-notch exper- tise in the field of optical flake sorting technologies. This summited in the development of Sortex A. Sortex A is a high speed PET and HDPE flake sort- ing solution which provides a through- put of 5 t/h – the highest throughput in the industry. Foreign items are detected with help of high-definition colour cameras and broadband LED lightning. In order to elevate the tar- geting result tiered chutes accurately separate the flakes from each other. Unwanted flakes are then ejected by the SmartEject system located directly under the chute. Depending on the desired result – either high output or high purity – of the separated flakes the algorithm`s sensitivity of the SmartEject can be adjusted. Latest development The Max-AI AQC (for Autono- mous Quality Control), NRT’s latest development, is able to take multiple sorting decisions autonomously. With the help of a machine vision system to see and artificial intelligence to iden- tify different materials only by form and to target and to prioritise, a robot then picks items correspondingly. The advanced system can be further trained in accordance with chang- ing waste streams. The Max-AI AQC capability of up to 65 picks per minute exceeds such of humans. Installed in combination with an NRT optical sorter human contact to waste can even be eliminated entirely. www.nrtsorters.com NRT has integrated the company’s SpydIR optical sorter with Max-AI tech- nology. The SpydIR technology uses near infrared light (NIR) detection to identify materials by type; Max-AI tech- nology uses artificial intelligence (AI) to identify materials using a camera and neural network algorithm (NN). Unifi, Inc.’s Repreve Bottle Processing Center in Reidsville, N.C. features the latest in separation technologies from the BHS family of companies, including NRT. The Editourmobil at NRT in Nashville, Tennessee Tour Sponsors: