Systematic Determination of the Influence of Factors Relevant to Operating Costs of Sensor-based Sorting Systems

Within the next decade, the recycling rates of all waste streams in the European Union are to be consistently increased (EU, 2018). Sensor-based sorting plays a crucial role in achieving those aims. However, the composition of the operating costs of sensor-based sorting systems (SBS), which are made up of compressed air and electricity costs, for example, has not yet been adequately investigated. The main cause is the massive experimental effort required to investigate these costs. In this paper, we pro-pose a systematic approach for determining the operating costs of SBS systems by using Design of Experiments (DoE). For this purpose, experiments are carried out to investigate whether the methodology of DoE is applicable to the use case of SBS. The resulting models are validated with statistical measures and additional experimental runs. For comparability of the results, two different materials, namely construction and demolition waste as well as plastic flakes, with grain sizes between 0 - 10 mm are investigated. With the presented approach high coefficients of determination of the regression models are reached. Consequently, the results show that precise regres-sion models can be derived with reduced effort.