Products : Air Knife

Airknife

The Impact Air Systems Airknife is typically employed within the recycling industry to remove low-value ‘lights’ fractions from the comingled materials. These small ‘unpickable’ items such as plastic, foil and film, strips of paper and plastic bags need to be removed from the material stream. It is very difficult, costly and time consuming to manually carry out this process using pickers or sorters.

The air knife therefore makes a welcome inclusion within the MRF as it makes the remaining manual sorting activities easier and more productive and the automation it brings to the plant reduces the overall operating costs.

The air knife is typically installed at the transfer junction between two conveyor belts and consists of an input air volume channelled through an adjustable nozzle, working in conjunction with an extraction hood. The material enters the Airknife via the input conveyor and falls under the action of gravity onto the next conveyor (either parallel or through a 90 degree turn).

The input air creates a high velocity stream of air through which the falling material has to travel. It is at this stage that the lighter material fractions are blown or separated from the falling material stream and captured by the extraction hood. The heavier material fractions are unaffected by the incoming air stream and simply continue to fall on to the discharge conveyor.

The same principles can be adopted and applied to a wide range of material streams including skip waste from construction and demolition or rigid plastic recycling processes.