Tribo-electrification system for electrostatic separation of plastics

The authors describe a novel tribo-electrification system developed at the Applied Electrostatic Research Centre of the University of Western Ontario for various mixtures of waste plastics. The system consists of: a single (or a battery of) specially designed rotating (long tubes) cylinders made out of selected metals which have been shown to achieve excellent selective tribo-electrification of the individual components in the processed mixtures, a HV Separation tower, and collecting trays (or conveyors) for the separated fractions. To show the performance of the cylinder, results are presented for separation experiments involving feeding four chosen tribo-electrified mixtures of two components of waste plastics obtained from processing industries in the form of flakes or granules of: polystyrene, polypropylene, and high density polyethylene.<>