Modeling and Optimization of a Separator for Granular Mixtures Composed of Multiple Insulating Materials

Commercial electrostatic separators have already been employed for the selective sorting of binary mixtures of granular materials. The aim of this paper is to validate the three-stage design of an electrostatic separator for recycling of plastics from granular waste electrical and electronic equipment WEEE. This separator, which combines two different methods of tribocharging, is specially built for processing ternary mixtures of granular materials. The experiment was performed on a mixture of polyvinyl chloride (PVC), high-impact polystyrene (HIPS), and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene. The purity of the obtained products was analyzed by using a program of image processing written in MATLAB. High purities (more than 81% for the PVC, 75% for the HIPS, and 97% for PA) were obtained at a recovery rate higher than 80%.