Product novelty 22. March 2024

Climate and sustainability goals, as well as the global political situation, require the extraction and recycling of recyclable materials from all possible sources in order to be able to react quickly and cost-effectively to customer inquiries in production facilities. This not only affects large companies, but increasingly also SMEs in order to be able to survive economically. It is all the more important to optimally recycle the scarce and limited resources in cycles with the lowest possible use of energy and processing aids, which are currently not used to a large extent.
Automated determination of the recyclable and disruptive materials contained is an indispensable basis for this. A largely unsolved challenge is the characterization of complex flows of recyclable materials, since even the most modern sensor technology does not directly allow for adequate sorting. Great potential is therefore seen in the fusion and multidimensional data analysis from all real-time capable sensors in combination with algorithms from the field of artificial intelligence.
New, cost-effective multispectral camera systems allow the recording of data sets in several wavelengths from the visible to the near-infrared range. A variety of material properties can be derived from this data, which are used, for example, to characterize the composition of material/product flows such as in waste separation.