A recycling plant for home electric appliances

摘要

The purpose of this project was to develop safe and efficient methods to recycle post-use home electric appliances, achieving a high rate of recovery of materials that can be reused as well as those that could have significant environmentalimpact. A key feature of this system is use of a primary disassembly process to remove major components prior to a chip-and-sort process for handling the remainder. Automation and mechanization have been introduced to ensure safe handling of large andheavy products. The disassembly line has the following key feature: Product model numbers are used to reference a database of disassembly information. The first time a particular product is disassembled, data is acquired at teaching stations and thedatabase makes this information immediately available to processing stations throughout the plant. Details are recorded when disassembly problems arise, and the next time the same product model is received, it is routed to a teaching station and thedatabase is updated with more accurate information. Table 1 lists the basic specifications of the recycling plant and Fig. 1 illustrates the concepts used to guide the design of the primary disassembly process.