Nowadays, the challenges in plant engineering are very complex. Through thorough planning and knowledge-based design and engineering of the individual unit operations, time-consuming and expensive errors can be avoided. The essential aspects must always be considered: Safety, quality, costs, and environmental compatibility. Precise knowledge of the critical material attributes and the influence of process parameters on the behavior of the materials to be processed is essential to guarantee that the finished plant will meet these requirements.
The ISOPREP consortium develops an efficient plant to remove post-consumer polypropylene from the waste stream and introduce it to a circular economy model. The Institutes of Process and Particle Engineering (IPPE) contribution in this project is the design of individual plant components. In the solvent-based approach we are pursuing, polypropylene must be efficiently extracted from the rest of the waste mixture and later returned to a solid form of virgin-like quality. The key process steps for the plant were designed using a combination of experimental analysis and computer-based simulations. The completed plant components will be assembled into the final plant in the coming weeks.
