Separating aluminum from shredded automotive scrap

Abstract

The metals recovered from automotive scrap can provide important resources for industrial development. Thus, the construction of a new plant was undertaken to help recycle valuable metals from nonferrous auto scrap in Taiwan. The main purpose of this project was to establish an automated heavy medium separation technique to cull aluminum from automotive scrap, and thus to replace the labor-intensive hand-picking process. The design capacity of the resulting heavy medium separation plant is two tonnes per hour and the completion of this plant will reduce hand-picking labor by 80%.

Electrodynamic Sorting of Industrial Scrap Metal

“…At present, Zorba is an especially difficult material to sort, and there does not yet appear to be any clear technological solution to the problem. For example, dense media separation attempts to exploit the disparity in mass density between so-called "light" metal fractions (e.g., aluminum and magnesium) and the "heavies" (e.g., copper, brass, and zinc) (Lee et al, 1994). Unfortunately, the process is prohibitively expensive to implement, and so very few recycling facilities are willing to invest in such an operation.…”