With FlexiPlant, we are designing a globally unique infrastructure for researching and developing flexible and sustainable technologies to extract and recycle metals from complex raw material sources, e.g. from electronic waste. The infrastructure connects equipment for pre-sorting, shredding and separation via a routing system that is not only flexible and automated, but can also be connected to new equipment developments at any time. Innovative, particle-based multi-sensor systems characterize material flows and individual samples. The data results are processed in real time using mathematical models and machine learning and fed into the heart of the infrastructure: the decision-making system, where artificial intelligence is used to evaluate separation processes and automatically and flexibly adapt process routes to the respective material and particle properties of the material flow. In this way, we endeavour to achieve optimum processing that recovers raw materials from complex material flows in an energy-efficient manner.
All publications based on FlexiPlant are welcome.