Decistor bv
Bilderdijkstraat 4
2013 EJ Haarlem
The Netherlands
+31 (0)23 534 81 48
Decistor and SPS
The challenge of the recycling industry is to produce raw materials that can compete on price and quality with virgin materials. These secondary raw materials -solid bulk products- are used as feedstock for the production of energy, building materials or new metals. The accelerating development of this industry leads to a growing demand for unambiguous quality description of materials in contracts, smart design of recycling facilities and flexible operations in order to meet specifications.
Decistor offers consultancy and software support for design, operations management and contract definition of this ‘urban mining’. In partnership with Resource Engineering of Delft University of Technology we developed an approach and a software simulation tool: SPS (Solids Processing Simulator). Other universities like the University of Rome “la Sapienza” and the Technical University of Denmark and clients provide knowledge too. The software and its growing libraries incorporate 25 years of theoretical and practical knowledge in the field of waste handling, liberation and separation.
SPS; the software simulation tool
How it works:
Matlib is a library of materials properties. The UOM’s are available unit operation models, representing process equipment. The waste is represented by Heaps, described as a mixture of particles. Recycling facilities are designed in Flowcharts. The Scheduler links heaps to a flowchart. The technical constraints as well as the costs and revenues are laid down in Contracts. The Simulator creates Technical output like the composition of the generated fractions and Economical output, the value of the different fractions. Ecology and Safety parameters are no integrated part of SPS. Instead, Decistor has found partners to add these aspects. The output of SPS can be linked with their tools.
After five years of development, SPS can be used to advise the secondary raw materials industry on design, operations management and contract definition. A combination of experience, SPS and the developed approach assures quality.
Projects
For Umicore we described material mixes and how to separate them. The aim is to create physical pre-processing to increase the efficiency of thermo-metallurgical processes.
For Resteel we described the functioning of their Clean Scrap Machine and developped performance criteria.
For a client of resteel we designed a scrap cleaning process, which we will operate for a while and than transfer to the client.