4.7 Article

Separation of mixed waste plastics via magnetic levitation

Journal

WASTE MANAGEMENT
Volume 76, Issue -, Pages 46-54

Publisher

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.wasman.2018.02.051

Keywords

Magnetic levitation; Waste plastics; Plastic separation; Mechanical recycling; Multiple plastic mixture; Density

Funding

  1. National Natural Science Foundation of China [51475420, 51635006]
  2. Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China [LZ18E050002]
  3. Ningbo Natural Science Foundation of Ningbo ST Bureau [2017A610136]
  4. Green Manufacturing System Integration Project of Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information

Ask authors/readers for more resources

Separation becomes a bottleneck of dealing with the enormous stream of waste plastics, as most of the extant methods can only handle binary mixtures. In this paper, a novel method that based on magnetic levitation was proposed for separating multiple mixed plastics. Six types of plastics, i.e., polypropylene (PP), acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), polyamide 6 (PA6), polycarbonate (PC), polyethylene terephthalate (PET), and polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), were used to simulate the mixed waste plastics. The samples were mixed and immersed into paramagnetic medium that placed into a magnetic levitation configuration with two identical NdFeB magnets with like-poles facing each other, and Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy was employed to verify the separation outputs. Unlike any conventional separation methods such as froth flotation and hydrocyclone, this method is not limited by particle sizes, as mixtures of different size fractions reached their respective equilibrium positions in the initial tests. The two-stage separation tests demonstrated that the plastics can be completely separated with purities reached 100%. The method has the potential to be industrialised into an economically-viable and environmentally-friendly mass production procedure, since quantitative correlations are determined, and the paramagnetic medium can be reused indefinitely. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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