Optical sorters from Chinese company Hefei Angelon Electronics use the company’s proprietary software to achieve high-purity fractions based on color.
The Angelon Plastic Color Sorters sort plastics based on a wide range of subtle color differences. The company makes two models of its CCD full-color sorter: the smaller A221C4-128V6, which has a throughput of 0.5 to 1.0 ton per hour, and the larger A421C8-256V6, which has a throughput of 1.0 to 2.0 tons per hour.
“Our plastic color sorter is able to work on various kinds of recycled plastics, including colorful PE bottle caps, PET bottle flakes, ABS crushing material, PP milk bottle flakes, transparent organic glass and a variety of other colorful mixed plastics,” said Irene Zhou of Hefei Angelon Electronics. “No matter if they are pellets or flakes, Angelon sorters have a high sorting accuracy and yield.”
Sorting a stream with impurities at 5 percent or less, the higher-capacity version of the sorter can achieve a sorting accuracy of up to 99.99 percent, according to the company.
The machines use a vibrating feeder system to evenly distribute plastic on a conveyor, which carries it at a fixed speed to ensure it falls through the observation point along a fixed trajectory. In mid-flight, detection cameras relying on LED lights capture images of the material. Air nozzles eject those colors that are targeted for removal from the stream. The lower-capacity model has 128 ejectors, and the higher-capacity one has 256 ejectors.
The equipment also has a dust wiper to ensure dust does not interfere with the sort. The wiper is triggered via preset timer.
Angelon designed its own software with a special algorithm for recognizing material to reject, according to the company. It describes the software as the best part of the machine.
