Introduction

Sustainable, economical handling of raw materials and closing material cycles are key objectives when recycling end-of-life products. In addition to metallic recyclable materials, which are separated from the input stream in the form of concentrates, mixtures of plastics, rubber, wood and other residues form another product of modern post-shredder plants. At our practice partner Unisort STEINERT GmbH in Zittau, a new sorting plant is being built and put into operation at the customer's site in Austria, which will separate dark plastics and fiber-reinforced plastics in particular.

As part of this work, investigations are to be carried out during the commissioning of a MIR sorting plant in order to be able to design a proper operation of the plant in the first step and optimization steps for sorting in the second.

The following subtasks are to be completed as part of the student project:

• Patent and literature research on sorting technologies in the context of plastics processing with a particular focus on spectral processes (NIR, MIR).
• Sampling and characterization during the commissioning of a MIR-based sorting plant. Provision of defined starting material (piece size distribution, material composition, moisture content, ...) and sampling of the plant material flows. (Touch) tests for sorting bio-based natural fiber-reinforced plastics as part of the LaNDER³ project.
• Evaluation of the MIR sorting plant on the basis of common process engineering parameters (Rm, Rc, c, i).

The result of the work is the balancing and evaluation of the sorting success for a new plant within an existing process. The results obtained from the investigations are to be interpreted.