Equipment Spotlight | DEC 2021 Eddy Current Separators

by MARY M. THORNTON

Culling the maximum amount of metal value from a scrap recycling operation can take many forms. One process that can be helpful is the use of an eddy current machine.

Bunting’s High Frequency Eddy Current Separator (HFECS) is used in the auto recycling, plastic PET and film and ICW wire recovery industries. “It provides significantly improved separation of small metallic particles from plastics and other non-metallic particulate.

The HFECS is designed both magnetically and structurally to produce some of the highest throwing and separation forces in the industry. It is ideal for separating and throwing smaller, conductive, nonferrous materials such as aluminum, copper and brass,” said Don Suderman, recycling industry product manager at Bunting. Suderman cited the difficulty of separating and recovering smaller and smaller particles of valuable metals from waste streams. Very small particles of metals such as copper and aluminum are being sent to landfills simply because conventional eddy current separators cannot recover the smallest particles of value. Similarly, other technologies such as conduction separation and robotic removal are also unable to effectively remove very small metal particles.

“The Bunting HFECS, however, excels at removing exceptionally small particles of valuable metals, including high-demand copper and aluminum – and we’ve seen recent price increases for those very metals. As the payback for those two materials increases, eddy current separators are in much higher demand and recyclers realize they should recover as much of these metals as possible. Otherwise, recyclers will be hauling valuable materials to a landfill and instead of seeing profits from the sale of recovered metals, recyclers will lose money while paying greater landfill fees,” Suderman stated.

He described how the goal at Bunting is to help customers recover as much product as possible. At the company’s Customer Experience Center, staff members run test samples of material sent in by potential customers, who then receive real, comprehensive results, showing how those materials can be processed, using Bunting products. This allows the company to pursue continued design excellence while building trust with their customers.

Industrial Magnetics, Inc. supplies eddy current and magnetic stainless separators for removal, recovery and separation of ferrous metals, nonferrous metals, and certain grades of stainless steel. Equipment is available in a range of sizes to fit customer footprint and capacity requirements. Custom sizes and other features are available to customers upon request. “In the scrap industry, customers use our drum magnets, magnetic pulleys, and suspended magnets to remove ferrous metal, eddy current separators for recovering and separating nonferrous metals, and our magnetic stainless steel conveyor (MSSC) separators for removal, recovery, and separation of lightly ferritic stainless steel, Dan Allore, director of engineering, noted.

A manufacturer of magnetic products since 1961, acquiring Javelin Manufacturing and Walker Magnetics has broadened the scope and scale of separation products manufactured by the firm. Industrial Magnetics offers products for the following markets: scrap metal and recycling, MRF recycling, MSW, e-scrap, food processing, waste to energy and associated industries.

Allore explained how “processing volume for their customers varies based on the application, but a typical customer processing base is between 5 to 20 tons per hour. During sales and engineering phases for our equipment, we strive to gather as much information about each application as possible, to prevent and eliminate issues during installation and setup of the equipment. By testing customer material in our lab, we have the opportunity to learn how our equipment will perform in a simulated customer environment. Increasingly, our customers strive to recover and refine more of the metals that are typically either sent to a landfill or classified as a mixed metal package. For example, we developed our MSSC magnetic separators specifically for stainless steel recovery and separation, as those metals were typically sold for a lower price in a mixed metal package. As the industry and technologies continue to evolve, our equipment provides the opportunity for both higher recovery and purity rates, allowing customers to increase revenue.”

“The recovery of nonferrous metals – those that contain aluminum, copper, zinc or brass – is the economic basis of countless recycling systems and Steinert’s eddy current separators, with an eccentric pole system, provide optimal recovery of nonferrous metals. It is no coincidence that more than 4,000 of them are in use worldwide, thanks to the high extraction volumes and at the same time, the durability they offer,” commented Robert Broughton, vice president.

“Eddy current separators (ECS) recover nonferrous metals from post-consumer scrap like end-of-life vehicles, e-waste, incineration bottom ash and other waste related applications. Steinert achieves extraordinary separation results through the use of neodymium-iron-boron magnets, a thin conveyor belt and an electrically non-conducting drum shell made of composite fiber materials. These ensure maximum field strengths and thus precise, efficient sorting – a technology that plays an important role in preserving resources. Our products help keep increasingly scarce resources in circulation. Day after day, our customers fight to ensure that the world won’t run out of resources. We all work together on the future of the circular economy,” he added.

In the treatment of secondary and primary raw materials, the company operates in both the resource recovery and mining sectors. The metal recycling division supplies sorting systems for the separation of auto shredder residue or aluminum recycling. The Steinert nonferrous separator produces a mixture of nonferrous metals, derived from different sorting materials. As the market favors pure metal fractions, for most customers, additional sorting steps are required to extract, for example, pure aluminum from a nonferrous metal mix. A Steinert XSS® T EVO 5.0 (x-ray sorting system) helps to solve this sorting task.

Based in Cologne, Germany for more than 130 years, with around 340 employees worldwide, Steinert provides a global network that supports customers with local contacts and expertise.

Published in the December 2021 Edition of American Recycler News