Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT

Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT

PARILAS

Pilot demonstration of high performance aluminium recycling by inline laser identification

Project PARILAS finished

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PARILAS

The project "Pilot demonstration of high performance aluminium recycling by inline laser identification - PARILAS" was successfully completed in 2012. For more information, please contact directly the coordinator.

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Welcome to PARILAS

The EU’s eco-innovation initiative is about reducing our environmental impact and making better use of resources. This means developing products, techniques, services and processes that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, use resources efficiently, promote recycling and so on. In this context, the project PARILAS offers a great potential in the field of material recycling and the reduction of CO2 emissions.

Compared to the highly energy-intensive primary production process of metals as for example of aluminium or magnesium, up to 95 % of the energy can be saved by remelting secondary alloys. Separating the metals by material grades avoids downgrading processes and lead to higher value-added industrial feedstock.

Concept and objectives

Pilot demonstration of high performance aluminium recycling by inline laser identification – PARILAS

The objective of PARILAS is a pilot demonstration of a next generation high performance aluminium recycling based on material grade specific sorting using inline laser identification. The light metal fraction of shredder scrap is a mixture of wrought and cast aluminium alloys. A high level recycling scheme is achievable if this mixture can be separated into cast and wrought fractions, and the wrought fractions further allocated to alloy types to provide high quality input material for remelters and refiners. With well characterized recycled aluminium alloy fractions current limitations of the process guidance in remelting and refining lines for the production of secondary aluminium can be overcome. The goal is to further improve the quality and widen the applicability of secondary aluminium.

A pilot sorting line is planned consisting of an individualization unit to put shredded aluminium scrap pieces on a belt conveyor moving with 3 m/s. The pieces pass a detection unit to localize their position and to acquire their 3D-shape while running along the belt conveyor. In the next section a laser identification unit directs dynamically a laser beam to each scrap piece to measure its chemical composition. This measurement is performed for 40 pieces per second. The measuring data are processed in real-time and used to control a subsequent pneumatic valve array which blows the pieces in dependence of the respective determined chemical composition into different boxes allocated to different alloy classes to be sorted. The principal feasibility of this approach was already shown in laboratory scale tests.

The demonstration of the economic feasibility of high performance aluminium recycling based on single particle sorting using laser technology is the central objective of the joint project. The purity of the sorted material fractions shell be > 95 % with a throughput of > 3t/h.