FT-IR spectroscopy and Hyperspectral Imaging applied to post-consumer plastic packaging characterization and sorting

Abstract

Post-consumer plastic packaging waste represents one of the main source of recovered polymers. A big problem now arising is thus the need to certify, in a fast (i.e. "on-line") and reliable way, recovered plastic composition, as well as to assess polymer mixtures bulk characteristics, in order to partially, or totally, re-use them. The study is addressed to utilize a new technique, HyperSpectral Imaging (HSI) based, in order to identify polymers as resulting from a recycling process. This approach was specifically adopted to identify the presence of PolyVinyl Chloride (PVC) in the heavy fraction resulting from an industrial sink-float process. PVC detection is important because heavy fraction recovery is finalized to its further re-utilization as Solid Recovered Fuels (SRF). The presence of this polymer, in fact, for its chlorine content (i.e. dioxin production during combustion) negatively affects the thermal recovery of these products. The study demonstrated as the proposed HSI based approach, in the NIR range (1000-1700 nm), can successfully utilized to set up "real time" analytical/control strategies to perform a continuous monitoring of the composition of the different flow plastic waste streams obtained by from industrial processing, with particular reference to PVC identification.

Smart Ecological Points, a Strategy to Face the New Challenges in Solid Waste Management in Colombia

“…In [29], it makes use of one of the important methods currently used to separate post-consumer polymers/plastics based on FT-IR spectroscopy and hyperspectral imaging.…”

Deep Learning for Chemometric Analysis of Plastic Spectral Data from Infrared and Raman Databases

“…SVM algorithm works based on the construction of a hyperplane that serves as a decision boundary between different classes (Musu et al, 2019;Yang et al, 2020;Yu et al, 2014;Zhu et al, 2019). These machine learning techniques have been found to give good results with IR spectra (Bonifazi et al, 2014;Calvini et al, 2018;Karaca et al, 2013;Rani et al, 2019;Said et al, 2020;S Serranti et al, 2020;Silvia Serranti et al, 2012Ulrici et al, 2013;Wu et al, 2020;Yang et al, 2020;Zhu et al, 2019), Raman spectra (Allen et al, 1999;L. Chen et al, 2017;Musu et al, 2019;Silva & Wiebeck, 2019) and LIBS spectra (Costa et al, 2017;Vahid Dastjerdi et al, 2018;Yan et al, 2021;Yu et al, 2014).…”

Sorting of Acrylonitrile-Butadiene-Styrene and Polystyrene Plastics by Microwave Cavity Resonance

“…The third method is infrared spectroscopy, based on the difference in infrared spectra reflected from the sample. This method can sort the two resins more accurately than the previous two, but cannot be used for black-or dark-colored samples that absorb infrared energy [4].…”