Recycling quality control

Applications X-ray fluorescence is widely used for direct examination of polymeric materials (analysis of additives, catalyst residues, etc.) from research to recycling, through production and quality control, to troubleshooting. Many problems meet the concentration range in which conventional XRF is strong, namely from ppm upwards. Table 8.42 is merely indicative of the presence of certain additive classes corresponding to elemental analysis element combinations are obviously more specific for a given additive. It should be considered that some 60 atomic elements may be found in polymeric formulations. The XRF technique does not provide any structural information about the analytes detected the technique also has limited utility when... 

Cement manufacturers use a number of quality control measures. Key among these is careful selection of fuels for recycling. Fuels that contain metals above specified levels, for instance, will be rejected. For that reason, each shipment of fuel is carefully analyzed to determine its ingredients. If the fuel fails to meet predetermined specifications, it will not be used. 

Product not meeting manufacturing specifications is either being recycled, separated for other uses, or discarded. After receiving the catalyst, the customer may apply his own quality control and may reject drums of catalysts which do not meet his inspection criteria. 

Ethylene, hydrogen, co-monomer and a super-high activity catalyst are fed into the reactors (1). Polymerization reaction occurs under a slurry state. The automatic polymer property control system plays a very effective role in product-quality control. Slurry from the reactors is pumped to the separation system (2). The wetcake is dried into powder in the dryer system (3). As much as 90% of the solvent is separated from the slurry and is directly recycled to the reactors without any treatment. The dry powder is pelletized in the pelletizing system (4) along with required stabilizers. 

We briefly discussed in Chap. 2 (Sec. 2.5) one important aspect of distillation column control when one of the products leaving the column is a recycle stream. Should the composition of this recycle stream be controlled Probably not from the perspective of the isolated column because the control loop holding the composition of the other stream leaving the column, which is a product from the plant, could then be more tightly tuned. However, the plantwide control perspective may show that the performance of the reactor can be improved by holding the purity of the recycle stream more constant, and this could result in smaller disturbances to the column. The overall effect may be better product quality control even though the product-quality loop is less tightly tuned. 

Note that the changes in production rate occur more quickly when the toluene recycle flowrate handle is used, compared to the reactor inlet temperature handle. Fresh feed rates of toluene and hydrogen change more quickly, as does benzene product flowrate. So if rapid transitions in production rate are important, toluene recycle flowrate manipulation is better than reactor inlet temperature manipulation. If tight product quality control is more important, the opposite is true. 

The response of the system to a reactor inlet temperature change is slower than that for a change in toluene recycle flowrate. Toluene recycle flowrate changes disturb the benzene product-quality control more than reactor inlet temperature changes. 

Keywords Degradation Multiple headspace extraction Quality control Recycling Solid-phase microextraction... 

For quality control reasons, rapid screening methods are needed to identify the volatiles in polymeric materials collected for recycling. HS-SPME-GC-MS was shown to be a fast and sensitive method to screen for brominated flame retardants in recycled polyamide materials [78]. HS-SPME effectively extracted several brominated compounds, all possible degradation products from the common flame-retardant Tetrabromobisphenol A from recycled polyamide 6.6. Furthermore, the high extraction capacity of the PDMS/DVB stationary phase towards aromatic compounds was demonstrated, as the HS-SPME-GC-MS method allowed the extraction and iden-tiflcation of brominated benzenes, from a complex matrix only containing trace amounts of analytes. In addition, degradation products from an antioxidant, a hindered phenol, were extracted. Figure 14 shows a typical chro-... 

HS-SPME is a very useful tool in polymer analysis and can be applied for absolute and semi-quantitative determination of the volatile content in polymers, for degradation studies, in the assessment of polymer durabihty, for screening tests and for quality control of recycled materials. For quantitative determination of volatiles in polymers, SPME can be combined with multiple headspace extraction to remove the matrix effects. If the hnearity of the MHS-SPME plot has been verified, the number of extractions can be reduced to two, which considerably reduces the total analysis time. Advantages of MHS-SPME compared to MAE are its higher sensitivity, the small sample amount required, solvent free nature and if an autosampler is used a low demand of labor time. In addition, if the matrix effects are absent, the recovery will always be 100%. This is valuable compared to other techniques for extracting volatiles in polymers in which the recovery should be calculated from the extraction of spiked samples, which are very difficult to produce in the case of polymeric materials. 

HS-SPME-GC-MS and HS-GC-MS were shown to be good tools to quality control recycled materials. The short-term properties of un-stabilized polyamide 6.6 were only slightly affected by in-plant recycling. However, during accelerated ageing in air at 100 °C, larger amounts of low-molecular-... 

Let s take a look at the control loops. Now the make-up stream of reactant B is fed on level controller LCf of the buffer tank. The flow rate of the exit stream (Recycle) is set at a constant value by a simple specification on the stream s script. There are also two level controllers LCt and LCb for the top and bottom inventories of the distillation column, which manipulate the distillate and bottom products, respectively. Besides, the top column pressure is kept constant by means of the condenser duty. Quality control is implemented only for the bottom product, the reflux being fixed. We considered a composition measure with a first-order lag transmitted to a controller that manipulates the reboiler duty. 

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