Separation Technique for Plastic-metal Compound Wastes by Using a Thermo-Fluid Flow

Abstract

In recent years, recycling of the prastic wastes has increased in importance for the environmental conservation and energy recovery.It is nessecery to develop separation techniques of the plastics from the compound wastes which consisted of plastic and metals and these materials machanically coupled with each other.In this paper, we introduce a new separation technique of plastics from compound wastes using a molten salt developed by the authors.A simple theoretical model was developed for predicting of the separation phenomena.The model includes both heating and deformation processes of the plastic.The heating process was analyzed as the boundary value problem of heat conduction involving with heat transfer.The flow of the fluidized plastic was described as a high viscosity flow driven by the buoyancy force.The separation time was theoretically derived from a combination of the heating time and the deformation time.The theoretical result was found to agree well with the experimental result.