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

全球人口不断增长，对消费品的需求不断增加，对我们日益减少的自然资源造成了严重的压力。再加上气候变化和粮食安全等其他全球性挑战，这种对资源管理的失败严重破坏了可持续未来的可能性。人们普遍认识到，我们需要采用循环经济，即回收使用过的和废弃的产品，回收它们的材料并重新使用，成为新产品的原料。例如，报废车辆、废弃电器和电子设备以及白色商品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，材料回收设施面临着一个坚韧的市场，受到国家和国际政策、贸易壁垒和资源波动的干扰。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，人们真实的需要更有效的分选技术，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。该提案旨在开发新的科学和概念，以推动新一代基于电磁和感应的有色金属分离技术。感应分选机，本质上是金属探测器，已经在回收设施中普遍使用，以提取不锈钢等低导电性金属。该项目调动了我们在电磁检测方面的研究，从食品测试到地雷探测等各种应用中的工作，提供了一类新的此类传感器-“智能”感应技术，该技术使用多频分析，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，具有更高的回收物纯度和相对于成本的有效回收。例如，在我们之前的工作中，我们证明了多频感应设计可以实现对报废车辆中最常见的有色金属（如铜，铝和黄铜）的有效分离性能。这一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重大举措，专注于材料表征的新方法，以破坏资源回收中的感应分离。我们制定了一项计划，以探索磁散射近似的新理论见解，例如磁极化率张量，通过开发快速有效的方法来扩展这项工作，以应对苛刻的吞吐量和金属回收条件。我们将展示这些新的方法，使用一个实验平台模拟工业材料分离钻机的关键功能，以获得相关的和现实的性能统计数据。我们的目标是，这项研究产生的新科学和结果将影响电磁传感器在资源回收中的使用方式，从而可能实现新的高通量和低成本分离技术，支持更有利可图和更活跃的循环经济。

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.