A Novel Shredder for Municipal Solid Waste (<i>MSW</i>): Effect of Operation Mode and Feed Composition

Abstract

In this paper a novel two-inlet MSW shredder was presented to overcome the intermission work of the single-course shredder. The reliability of the two-inlet shredder was investigated and four organic constituents of MSW namely plastic, kitchen garbage, leaves and branch were shredded in the two-inlet shredder to evaluate the shredder adaptability to MSW complex composition. The results show that compared with single-course shredder, the two-inlet operation mode improves shredding efficiency and reduces energy consumption to a great extent. With the double-inlet operation，about 73% as much energy is used per gram as with the single-course shredder. The shredder is much more effective for the pulverization of soft, ductile and fibrous materials (kitchen garbage and leaves in the test), but it is not good at the brittle material (branch). A total of 57.7% product of branch is below 10mm in size, while for kitchen garbage and leaves, the values are 97.7% and 92.5% respectively. And the value is the lowest for plastic, only 38.0 %.