Realising Advanced Sensor Technology for Enhanced Recovery of Metal Scrap (RASTER)

不断增长的全球人口和不断增长的消费品需求给我们日益减少的自然资源带来了严重的压力。再加上气候变化和粮食安全等其他全球性挑战，资源管理的失败严重破坏了实现可持续未来的可能性。人们普遍认为，我们需要采用循环经济，将使用过的和丢弃的产品回收利用，将其材料回收再利用，成为新产品的原料。例如，报废车辆、废弃电气和电子设备以及白色家电都含有大量有价值的金属，如铝、铜、黄铜、铅、镁、镍、锡和锌，这些金属可以回收并返回供应链，从而获利。然而，由于国内和国际政策、贸易壁垒和资源波动的干扰，材料回收设施面临着艰难的市场环境。面对这些挑战，回收商不得不重新审视他们的混合金属产品。现在确实需要更有效的分类技术，推动投资以提高回收物的效率、容量、产量和质量，同时最大限度地减少填埋的残留物。该提案旨在发展新的科学和概念，以推动新一代基于电磁和感应的有色金属分离技术。感应分选器，本质上是金属探测器，已经在回收设施中普遍使用，用于提取低导电性金属，如不锈钢。该项目调动了我们在电磁检测方面的研究，这些研究是从食品检测到地雷检测的各种应用中发展起来的，提供了一类新的传感器——“智能”感应技术，它使用多频分析、新的理论磁散射近似和视觉信息来分类和分离更广泛的有色金属，这些有色金属具有更高的可回收纯度和相对于成本的高效回收。例如，在我们之前的工作中，我们展示了一种多频感应设计可以有效地分离一些最常见的有色金属，如铜、铝和黄铜，这些金属出现在报废车辆的碎片废物中。这种简单的创新在标准感应技术上的成功使我们与英国领先的磁选设备制造商合作开发商业分选解决方案。该项目是我们研究战略的下一个主要举措，重点是材料表征的新方法，以破坏资源回收中的诱导分离。我们制定了一项计划，以探索磁散射近似的新理论见解，例如磁极化张量，通过开发快速有效的方法来扩展这项工作，以处理苛刻的吞吐量和金属回收条件。我们将使用模拟工业材料分离装置的关键特征的实验平台来演示这些新方法，以获得相关和现实的性能统计数据。我们的目标是，从这项研究中产生的新科学和结果将影响电磁传感器在资源回收中的应用，有可能实现新的高通量、低成本分离技术，从而支持更有利可图、更活跃的循环经济。

A growing global population and the rising demand for consumer products is imposing severe pressures on our dwindling natural resources. Combined with other global challenges such as climate change and food security, this failure to manage resources seriously undermines the likelihood of a sustainable future. It is widely recognized that we need to adopt a circular-economy, where used and discarded products are recycled, their materials recovered and re-used to become the feedstock for the new. For example, end-of-life vehicles, waste electrical and electronic equipment, and white goods all contain substantial quantities of valuable metals, such as aluminium, copper, brass, lead, magnesium, nickel, tin and zinc, which can profitably be recovered and returned to the supply chain. Materials recovery facilities however, face a tough market place with disruption from national and international policies, trade barriers, and resource volatility. Against these challenges, recyclers are having to re-examine their mixed metal products. There is now a real need for more effective sorting technologies, driving investment to improve efficiency, capacity, yields, and quality of the recyclate, while minimizing the residue set for landfill.This proposal aims to develop new science and concepts to drive a new generation of electromagnetic and induction-based non-ferrous metal separation technologies. Induction sorters, essentially metal detectors, are already in common use in recovery facilities to extract low-conductivity metals such as stainless steel. This project mobilizes our research in electromagnetic inspection, developed from work across a range applications as diverse as food testing to detection of landmines, to deliver a new class of these kinds of sensors - 'smart' induction technologies which use multi-frequency analysis, new theoretical magnetic scattering approximations, and visual information to classify and separate a much wider set of non-ferrous metals with higher recyclate purities and efficient recovery relative to cost. For example, in our previous work we showed that a multi-frequency induction design could achieve effective separation performance for some of the most common non-ferrous metals seen in end-of-life vehicles shredded waste - metals such as copper, aluminium and brass. The success of this simple innovation over standard induction technology has led us to partner with a leading UK magnetic separation equipment manufacturer to develop a commercial sorting solution.This project is the next major initiative in our research strategy, focusing on new approaches for materials characterization to disrupt induction separation in resource recovery. We set out a plan to explore new theoretical insights in magnetic scattering approximation, such as the magnetic polarizability tensor, expanding on this work by developing fast and efficient approaches that deal with the demanding through-put and conditions of metal recovery. We will demonstrate these new approaches using an experimental platform emulating the key features of an industrial material separation rig to obtain relevant and realistic performance statistics. Our goal is for the new science and results that emerge from this research will impact how electromagnetic sensors are used in resource recovery, potentially enabling new high-throughput and lower-cost separation technologies that support a more profitable and buoyant recycling economy.