Windshifter with a "special touch"

26-02-2020

Wow! Our Nihot Windshifter arrived today. With a special window, so that we can investigate what exactly happens inside the windshifter when settings are changed.

About windshifters

The role of a windshifter in a plastic sorting line is the extraction of films. The thus created film flow must comply with the DKR standard so that it is suitable for further processing.

Film: valuable raw material and disturbant

Foil is a raw material, but also a disturbing substance. Films are removed at the start of the sorting process. But if the films are not removed properly, they can have a disturbing effect on the NIR separation process.

For example, films can overlay other materials, which means that the underlying material is not properly recognized. Furthermore, films often have a different speed than the conveyor belt; they swirl above the belt. Although the type of material is then properly recognized by the NIR, it is blown away at the wrong moment by the blower. After all, the blower does not take into account that the film does not have the same speed as the conveyor belt.

Because the films are both a raw material and a disturbing material, it is a stream that deserves extra attention.

Optimisation

If you opt for a film stream that is as clean as possible, you will thus extract fewer films and only collect the really light films. But this results in a film-contaminated flow in the rest of the line with a higher potential of incurring disturbances.

If you choose to extract as many films as possible, you risk that the sorting stream does not meet the DKR standard and therefore loses value. But you will have fewer disturbances in the downstream process.

Where is the optimum? With this Nihot Windshifter, we have the right equipment to investigate this. It has a window which gives us insights of what is actually happening inside. Therefore, it is not a black box, but a very nice tool for research and optimization testing. Due to the modular design of our sorting line, we can for example also test whether a single-step or a multi-step throughput increases the effectiveness of the sorting process.