Dr Lijuan Wang, (Lecturer in Electronic Engineering) has won the EPSRC New Investigator Award for the project “Automatic quality assessment of waste plastic bales through hybrid sensing and data driven modelling”.
Plastic waste is one of the most serious environmental challenges across the world. A key issue causing the low recycling rate is the uncertainty of the quality of recycled plastics. It is usually mixed with a wide range of non-plastic and non-recycling materials.
Therefore, an automatic and non-destructive measurement technology is highly desirable for accurate identification and quantification of materiel type and composition in waste plastic bales and further assessment of the quality of bales.
“This project is to investigate the optical and electrical characteristics of materials through hybrid sensing techniques and develop data driven models to deduce the information of material distribution, material composition and quality category of waste plastic bales,” says Lijuan, “This will provide a novel way for automatic and accurate inspection of baled materials and thus will significantly improve the efficiency of recycling processes. In addition, the established assessment criteria will ensure a clearer and more accurate definition of the quality of materials, which will result in more transparent pricing and greater clarity in global trade of waste plastics.”
Congratulations to Lijuan on this achievement.