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• Throughput Rate

Project description

Müllex-Umwelt-Säuberungs GmbH deals with the collection, treatment and recycling of non-hazardous and hazardous waste. The company operates a plant for processing substitute fuels (RDF). Sorting residues from the light packaging (LVP) sorting, which are delivered in bales, are used as input material for the RDF system for high-calorific RDF.

This plant should be operated with maximum throughput, whereby an acceptable recovery of valuable materials with a correspondingly high purity can be achieved. In the future, depending on the composition of the input material, the plant should adjust its throughput using a sensor-based sorting machine based on NIR technology in order to meet the requirements in terms of output and purity.

Project duration

22.10.2020 – 22.10.2021

Aims of the project

The project objective of the present project "Throughput Rate" is the creation of data records on purity and output depending on the input composition and the throughput using sensor-based NIR technology. With the help of these data sets, applicable knowledge for the company to improve the quality of the produced RDF can be obtained in order to be able to adapt the plant operation ideally to the input material.

The benefit for Müllex-Umwelt-Säuberungs GmbH lies in the improvement of the quality of the RDF product manufactured in this plant as well as an increase in the processed quantities, if the generated data records can be used to derive related algorithms for a plant optimization with regard to independent throughput setting.

In waste processing plants there are currently no such algorithms that have been developed in laboratory or plant operation with real waste, so that plant operation is automatically set at the desired RDF output quality with maximum throughput.

So far, no sensor-based sorting has been installed in the Müllex system for recovering recyclable material from the 3D RDF fraction; the project results therefore essentially serve as a basis for making decisions about the investment, in order to be able to find out to what extent the quality of the RDF products and the throughput quantities of the System with a sensor-based sorting machine and an automated control loop for setting the throughput. The product quality is decisive for the RDF price and the throughput is the amount that can be processed annually. Both parameters are therefore decisive for calculating the amortization period for investing in a sensor-based sorting machine.

Funding

The Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG)

Project partner

Müllex-Umwelt-Säuberung-GmbH

You can send a message directly to the project responsible Mister Dipl.-Ing. Karl Friedrich by using the following form.