Off-line And On-line Analysis And Recognition Of Post-Consumer Polyolefins (PP-PE), Of Different Origin And Characteristics, By Innovative Spectroscopic Sensing Techniques

Abstract:

Among Plastic Solid waste (SW), polyolefins represent a very important family of polymers, constituting more than a third of the total plastics consumption in Europe, but they are the least recycled plastic materials, as a consequence polyolefins waste recovery represents one of the major opportunities in PSW. The possibility offered by HyperSpectral Imaging (HSI) based sensing architectures has been investigated in order to develop innovative sensing architectures and logics finalized to perform polyolefins recognition. Due to the high degree of innovation of HSI and the relative low knowledge, in terms of available hyperspectral libraries, related analytical tools and HSI based recognition strategies, a study was thus carried to explore the potentialities of the proposed approach. The investigations have been thus carried out in two steps: i) collection of a large number of post-consumer polyolefin samples characterized by different attributes and ii) systematic application of different spectroscopic sensing techniques (FT-IR spectroscopy, by Raman spectroscopy and by hyperspectral imaging) in order to identify the different plastic particles to be recycled, with particular reference to the polyolefins present inside complex plastic wastes. The spectral signatures collected adopting the different techniques have been thus detected, analysed and compared. The main parameters that allow to perform the recognition of the polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP) have been defined, with particular reference to the hyperspectral imaging innovative technique. The analytical strategies can be utilised to define sorting and/or control logics to be applied in “on-line” control architectures to directly act at industrial plant level.

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