MELT FILTRATION | TECHNOLOGY


replacement depends on the level of contamina- tion contained in the filtered material. Cofit built its new in-house lab at its headquar-


ters in Cerro Maggiore, near Milan. The lab serves two purposes: to provide a service for customers to test their material and to enable Cofit to test its own new products independently. Alessandro Fabbri said this benefits the company in its product development, allowing it to expand its product range quickly, as well as enhance and upgrade its existing product portfolio. He said: “Our invest- ments in the lab – involving a single screw extrud- er size 130 – is a clear sign of how much Cofit is increasingly focussing on Research & Development and technical innovation, the aim being to offer novelties, constantly. Before our lab was built, we had to ask for customer support to carry out tests, and it wasn’t that easy. Today, the whole process is speeded up.” In February, Fimic of Italy


presented its latest melt filtration innovations to the North American plastics recycling industry during the US Association of Plastics Recy- clers (APR) meeting, which was held in conjunction with the Plastics Recycling 2018 conference in Nashville. Fimic recently joined APR, and at the event in Nashville, Fimic’s general manager, Erica Canaia, talked about one of the company’s latest innovations, introduced to North America in 2017: laser screens for the filtration of LDPE and HDPE contaminated material. Canaia said Fimic’s auto- matic melt filters are already well known in the US and Canadian markets, but up to recently, only for applications with punched-type screens in which filtration is in the range of 300-2,000 microns (50 to 10 mesh). Since last year, she said, by taking advantage of laser drilling technology, Fimic is now able to supply laser-drilled screens that can filter down to 100 microns (140 mesh). Fimic’s ERA melt filtration system will be in- stalled for the first time by a Canadian recycler this spring. The ERA system has two filtration chambers with two different levels of filtration. In this project, the filter’s first chamber will be dedicated to a rough filtration, using punched-hole screens, while the second chamber will use laser-drilled screens. Canaia said: “This method will guarantee that the most expensive screens will get material already pre-filtered so that the most aggressive


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contaminants have been taken out. The two filtering chambers are separated and have independent discharging valves so that recyclers can calibrate differently the discharge of each chamber through independent, temporized opening of each valve.” In her presentation, Canaia talked about several other customer case studies. In particular, she discussed one in which a company incorporated a Fimic filter in its processing of post-consumer, washed LDPE, which is heavily contaminated with paper,


PET and aluminium. With the


Fimic system, the recycler’s material is now filtered down to 100 microns, and the pellets produced are used for film blowing applications. Another Fimic user case she presented was about a line processing pipe-grade HDPE, now filtered at 150 microns. “With the installations


of the Fimic filter, because of


the machine’s larger filtering area (compared to those offered by other competitors) both of these recent customers have experienced an increase in their throughput and a huge saving in spares,” said Canaia. “If we compare the Fimic to a sliding


filter, where an operator is forced to face very frequent changing of the mesh because of contam- ination, this causes a high cost in screens, both for the changing of the mesh and for their disposal. It also leads to an overall reduced quality of output, because it remains subject to human error.” Canaia’s presentation also described the overall


flexibility of Fimic’s filters, which can adapt to a number of materials, even when extremely con- taminated, as in the case of post-consumer materials. She said Fimic’s filters use a proven scraping system, well known for its simplicity and flexibility, and for its ability to deal with various types of contaminants, including sand, metal, paper, paperboard and wood. ADG Solutions was another melt filtration specialist at the APR event in February. The US- based company launched its Continuous Filter Operation (CFO) system at K2016. Sandy Guthrie, President of ADG Solutions, said at the launch: “Our new CFO melt filter has oversized drive and gearbox, so it has the guts to handle the toughest applications. The beefy filter housing and bolt pattern prevents leakage, even at high operating


March/April 2018 | PLASTICS RECYCLING WORLD 19


Left: Fimic’s melt filters are finding new customers in North America


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