Methods for identifying used home electric appliances in a recycling system

摘要

We have developed two methods for identifying used home electric appliances. These identification methods can both improve performance and reduce running costs of a recycling system. We considered methods of identifying appliances according to overall shape, the size of each face of the appliance (face size), mass, design, and information on the name plate. As a result, we found that identification by face size and by face size and mass are the most effective methods. Air conditioners, refrigerators, televisions, and washing machines of four manufacturers were identified by using these two methods. And when identifying by face size, 97.2% of these appliances were identified in a time of 0.5 ms (data recorded on a PC : 486 DX 4 100 Hz CPU), and when identifying by both face size and mass, 99.5% were identified. These results show that the two identification methods (i.e., by face size or by face size and mass) can be applied to recycling systems.