Technical polymers & plastic interfaces

Industrial polymeric articles often combine several constituents: a main polymer, a gasket, a protective film, an adhesive, a fibre reinforcement, a filler or a second polymer. In the case of PMMA, for example, contamination by PVC, adhesive, film or fibre can strongly affect recycling or depolymerisation routes. Conventional operations — manual cutting, scraping, mechanical grinding, thermal or chemical treatment — may be slow, costly, incomplete or generate additional contaminants. The industrial bottleneck is therefore the ability to cleanly separate the valuable polymer before downstream processing.

XCRUSHER applies a pulsed field in a liquid medium capable of propagating pressure waves. These waves interact with the polymeric article and promote division at the interfaces between the thermoplastic polymer and other constituents. The objective is not to grind everything indiscriminately. The objective is to target interfaces: polymer / PVC, polymer / film, polymer / adhesive, polymer / fibre or polymer / filler. This approach can prepare more differentiated fractions, easier to sort and better suited to downstream routes: mechanical recycling, density separation, dissolution, depolymerisation or other treatment depending on the polymer.