Viscosity Homogenization Treatment of Waste Plastic Recycling, Development of Process and Control Methods

One of the unsolved problems on recycling of waste plastic is the viscosity non-uniformity; the viscosity of recycling plastics is neither stable nor homogeneous as the material is a mixture of pieces of various products with different molecular weights. In this study, we propose a processing system of recycling plastics, the so-called continuous viscosity homogenization treatment system. In this system, we maintain the viscosity by blending virgin resins to waste plastics with monitoring the viscosity via an in-line rheometer. Tsenoglou's equation was used in the homogenization treatment. We evaluated the concept for mixtures of aqueous solutions of poly (ethylene oxide) which is one of the entanglement polymers. The viscosity after the homogenization treatment was in good agreement with the target viscosity.