SBIR Phase I: High-Purity Extraction of PET from Carpet Waste

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）项目将能够从目前无法回收的复杂废物中回收有价值的材料。这一创新的商业影响是允许包含多种材料的复杂废物流，如地毯和纺织品，以一种成本优势的方式作为制造新产品的原材料来源。这给那些使用这种原材料的企业提供了一种可持续的替代品，一种成本更低、生产效率更高的材料。通过这种方式，将有很大的动力来重新利用成千上万吨的材料，这些材料现在要么被填埋，要么被海洋填埋，要么被焚烧以获取能源——这是一种非常低价值的应用。该项目将产生一个全新的框架，用于回收复杂的多组分材料。该项目将开发分选复杂废物的新技术。地毯和纺织品等多组分废物占堆填区总量的4%以上。今天，还没有技术可以回收这些废物中的高价值材料。拟议的项目打算开发一种使用化学技术的新方法，而不是简单的熔体回收，以便从这些废物中回收高价值聚合物。将进行化学工艺开发，以便将该技术的当前状态提高到可以在试验工厂中实施的状态。主要的技术目标是开发生产一致性高纯度产品的工艺。像聚酯和尼龙这样的材料目前还不能从天然纤维或纤维素纤维中分离出来，比如棉花，甚至像地毯中发现的那些重交联橡胶。该研究的目标是发展提议者目前的尼龙和聚酯分馏工艺，重点是实现高纯度产品的再利用。为此，将研究各种溶液处理技术，以排除最终产品聚合物中的杂质。

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project will enable the recycling of valuable materials from complex wastes that today cannot be recovered. The commercial impact from this innovation is to allow for complex waste streams that contain multiple materials, such as carpets and textiles, to serve as the source of raw materials for the manufacture of new goods in a way that is cost advantaged. This gives those businesses that use such raw materials a sustainable alternative and, a lower-cost, efficiently produced material. In this way, there will be significant incentive for the reuse of thousands of tons of material that today either goes to landfills, oceans, or is incinerated for energy- a very low value application. The project will yield an entirely new framework for recycling of complex, multi-component materials. This project will develop novel technologies for fractionating complex wastes. Multi-component wastes such as carpets and textiles represent upwards of 4% of total landfill volume. Today, there does not exist technology for recovering the high-value materials that are in these wastes. The proposed project intends to develop a new approach using chemical techniques as opposed to simple melt recycling, to enable the value-added recycling of high value polymers from such wastes. Chemical process development will take place in order to take the current status of the technology to a status that is ready for implementation in a pilot plant. The main technical objective is to develop the process for production of consistent, high purity product. Materials such as polyester and nylon currently cannot be separated from natural or cellulosic fibers such as cotton or even heavily cross-linked rubbers as those that are found in carpet. The goals of the research are to develop the proposers' current process for fractionating the nylons and polyesters with an emphasis on achieving high purity products for reuse. To this end, various solution processing techniques will be investigated for exclusion of impurities from end product polymer.