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IPRT Company Assistance Success StoryBetter Sorting with NDE
IPRT’s nondestructive evaluation experts helped Tire Environmental of Muscatine create a better process for removing wire strands from shredded tires, making a product suitable for mulch and other applications. Tire Environmental of Muscatine, Iowa, makes products from recycled shredded tires. The company was exploring additional markets for its products and came to Paul Gormley of Iowa State University’s Center for Industrial Research and Service for assistance. One project involved the problem of removing exposed wire from pieces of shredded tires so that it could be used as landscape mulch. While Tire Environmental had been using magnetic separation to screen out most of the shredded tire bits that contained exposed wire strands, the company had to use a time-consuming and costly visual inspection process to detect the final entrapped steel. Without a considerable leap in capabilities, the company would not be able to scale up to make the venture profitable. So, Gormley asked Dave Utrata, manager of IPRT’s nondestructive evaluation group, to review the company’s separation process. As some of the pragmatic aspects of the inspection were beyond the specialty of the group, IPRT invited Industrial Motion Technologies of West Des Moines, Iowa, who represented Eriez Magnetics, a firm that specializes in magnetic separation, to get involved. This company reviewed the metal detection process at Tire Environmental and made suggestions for improvement. Meanwhile, IPRT’s NDE group verified the use of X-ray inspection to reliably detect wires trapped in batches of shredded tires. While this testing was not anticipated to be practical in the field, it helped the team validate proposed alternate sorting methods. As a result of the collaboration, Tire Environmental has significantly improved sorting capabilities with verified quality. “Since we finished the NDE project, the quality of our product has changed so much for the better,” says Dennis Froehlich, company general manager, “No one else in the industry seemed to have the answers for me, I am just so glad that Dave and his team were able to help us with this tough problem.” IPRT works for Iowa |
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