Open Competition - Advanced Materials/Chemicals (October 2000)

High Speed Identification and Sorting of Non-Ferrous Metal Scrap

Sponsor: wTe Corporation

• Project Performance Period: 11/1/2000 - 10/31/2003
• Total project (est.): $2,562,805.00
• Requested ATP funds: $1,997,377.00

Each year, U.S. industry discards tens of billions of pounds of non-ferrous metals as waste or mixed scrap. SpectraMet, a jointly owned venture of wTe Corporation (a plastics and metals recycling company) and National Recovery Technologies, Inc. (a designer and manufacturer of innovative recycling equipment), hopes to recover an economically significant portion of this scrap by developing an advanced optoelectronic materials identification and sorting technology. SpectraMet's technology is derived from analytical techniques developed for the Mars Pathfinder program. Unlike existing large metals processing facilities -- which rely on hand sorting, have limited accuracy and can be polluting -- computerized plants using SpectraMet technology would be modular, less polluting, smaller in size, inexpensive to build and operate, and more accurate in unambiguously sorting scrap metal alloys by composition. Preliminary, bench-scale tests of the technology, performed under the National Science Foundation SBIR program, successfully demonstrated the ability to accurately identify -- within milliseconds -- and rapidly sort small objects made of brass and copper alloys; stainless alloys; zinc alloys; or chrome-plated zinc alloys. The goals of the ATP-funded project include: learning how to best prepare non-ferrous scrap for separation; investigating physical and electronic parameters of the detection system that influence identification; developing techniques to automatically and reliably feed scrap to the sorter, expanding the number of alloys sorted (up to 200) without loss of accuracy, and hardening the system to operate reliably in a scrap yard environment. Private funding souces have deemed the project too risky, and ATP support will allow the two companies that formed SpectraMet to develop and implement a pilot unit and subsequent prototype unit. If successful, the project could improve the accuracy of separation of high-quality non-ferrous concentrates from the nation's automobile shredders, as well as the recovery of non-ferrous materials from municipal refuse streams.

For project information:

Dr. David B. Spencer, (781) 275-6400
dbswte@aol.com

ATP Project Manager

Jean-Louis Staudenmann, (301) 975-4866
jstaudenmann@nist.gov