• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.26 no.5
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• pp.416-422
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• 2016

Lots of plastics are widely used in a variety of industrial field. And the amount of plastic waste is massively produced. In the study of waste recycling, it is emerged as an important issue to prevent the waste of potentially useful resource materials as well as to reduce ecological damage. So, the recycling of plastic waste has been currently paid attention to from the view point of reuse. Existing automatic sorting system consist of near infrared ray (NIR) sensors to classify the types of plastics. But the classification of black plastics still remains a challenge. Black plastics which contains carbon black are not almost classified by NIR because of the characteristic of the light absorption of black plastics. This study is focused on handling how to identify black plastics instead of NIR. Raman spectroscopy is used to get qualitative as well as quantitative analysis of black plastics. In order to improve the performance of identification, Support Vector Machine(SVM) classifier and Principal Component Analysis(PCA) are exploited to more preferably classify some kinds of the black plastics, and to analyze the characteristic of each data.

• Resources Recycling
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.69-77
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• 2017

Used small household appliances(small e-waste) consists of a variety of complex materials and components. The small e-waste is mainly composed of plastics and an important potential source of waste plastic. The black plastics, particularly are very difficult to separate by resin type and therefore these are mainly recycled in the form of a mixtures. In the present study, the sorting technologies such as gravity and electro static separation, near-infrared ray(NIR) and IR/Raman optical sorting separation on mixture of black plastics were analyzed and their limitations on sorting process were also investigated. The Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy(LIBS) spectrum of each black plastics was used for identification of black plastics by resin type, and after analyzing the normalization operation, Principal Component Analysis(PCA) was carried out. The spectrum data was optimized through PCA process. In order to improve the identification accuracy and sorting efficiency of black plastics, it is necessary to design a classifier with high efficiency and to improve the performance and reliability of the classifier by applying the field of intelligent algorithms.

• Resources Recycling
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• v.26 no.6
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• pp.73-83
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• 2017

Used small household appliances have a wide variety of product types and component materials, and contain high percentage of black plastics. However, they are not being recycled efficiently as conventional sensors such as near-infrared ray (NIR), etc. are not able to detect black plastic by types. In the present study, an automatic sorting system was developed based on laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) to promote the recycling of waste plastics. The system we developed mainly consists of sample feeder, automatic position recognition system, LIBS device, separator and control unit. By applying laser pulse on the target sample, characteristic spectral data can be obtained and analyzed by using CCD detectors. The obtained data was then treated by using a classifier, which was developed based on artificial intelligent algorithm. The separation tests on waste plastics also were carried out by using a lab-scale automatic sorting system and the test results will be discussed. The classification rate of the radial basis neural network (RBFNNs) classifier developed in this study was about > 97%. The recognition rate of the black plastic by types with the automatic sorting system was more than 94.0% and the sorting efficiency was more than 80.0%. Automatic sorting system based on LIBS technology is in its infant stage and it has a high potential for utilization in and outside Korea due to its excellent economic efficiency.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.11 no.6
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• pp.1872-1879
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• 2016

The techniques to recycle and reuse plastics attract public attention. These public attraction and needs result in improving the recycling technique. However, the identification technique for black plastic wastes still have big problem that the spectrum extracted from near infrared radiation spectroscopy is not clear and is contaminated by noise. To overcome this problem, we apply Raman spectroscopy to extract a clear spectrum of plastic material. In addition, to improve the classification ability of fuzzy Radial Basis Function Neural Networks, we apply supervised learning based clustering method instead of unsupervised clustering method. The conditional fuzzy C-Means clustering method, which is a kind of supervised learning based clustering algorithms, is used to determine the location of radial basis functions. The conditional fuzzy C-Means clustering analyzes the data distribution over input space under the supervision of auxiliary information. The auxiliary information is defined by using k Nearest Neighbor approach.