Gneuss, a family-owned supplier of innovative solutions for the plastics processing industry, is introducing its turnkey recycling lines for the processing of bulky and contaminated PET industrial waste at this year’s ITMA Asia + CITME, which takes place in Shanghai, China, from 15-19 October.

Gneuss Recycling Lines are designed to make it possible to process the most diverse types of waste from production processes and return the material directly to production. These lines are based on the Gneuss Processing Unit with the MRS extruder and the (optional) Polyreactor JUMP.

“It consists of the MRS extruder with its excellent decontamination and devolatilisation performance, a self-cleaning, process and pressure-constant automatic Rotary Filtration System and an Online Viscometer with intelligent viscosity monitoring and control,” the manufacturer explains. “Optionally, the JUMP reactor can be integrated. This is a sophisticated processing step to accurately boost the IV of the PET polymer in the melt phase. The JUMP system offers a fast, compact and economic alternative to SSP processes and permits the direct processing of waste materials back into a production process.”

In the manufacturing of semi-finished products, such as fibre and nonwoven, waste material is unavoidably created during various steps of the production process. In the manufacture of synthetic fibres, for example on a direct fibre spinning line with a capacity of 500 tonnes per day, some 5 to 10 tonnes of waste are typically created every day. This is a large amount of waste raw material, which can be re-used.

Gneuss Recycling Line

The Gneuss Recycling Line has been developed as an optimum solution for waste, which consists of a variety of different types such as voluminous waste with a low bulk density, start-up lumps and waste such as fibres which are coated with spin finish oils. The system is compact and energy efficient as no additional heat input is required.

Gneuss offers different recycling concepts, for the processing of fibre into high quality pellets/chips, as well as for the direct feeding of melted production waste into the spinning process.

With the Gneuss recycling concepts, fibre waste can be directly reprocessed, without detrimentally affecting the quality of the end product, according to the company. The size-reduced and agglomerated wastes are melted in the MRS extruder where they are devolatilised – volatile contaminants such as absorbed or surface water, spin finish oils or other processing oils are extracted. Further, the required viscosity is adjusted in the MRS extruder. The intensive surface area exchange rate in the MRS extruder makes it especially suitable for these applications.

Once the volatile contaminants have been removed and the viscosity is adjusted, solid contaminants such as glass, wood, paper and ceramics are filtered out with the Gneuss Rotary Filtration System RSFgenius or SFXmagnus. “These patented screen changers distinguish themselves by a high degree of automation and safe operation. They make an almost 100 %-line availability possible,” the company adds.

Main characteristic

The main characteristic of the systems is the filter disk on which the screen cavities are located in a ring pattern and which is completely encapsulated by the two filter blocks. It is thus protected from contact with the environment. A sealed safety cover makes an easy access to the filter disk for screen changes possible. The melt channel design excludes dead spots and reduces the dwell time of the melt to an absolute minimum.

Since the last ITMA Asia all models of the patented Rotary Filtration Systems have been completely revised, the company reports. Modifications to the screen changer housings now permit operation on a wider range of applications at higher pressures, whilst offering enlarged active filtration areas.

www.gneuss.com