‘Owl’ flies in to tackle flake control shortcomings

Never a dull moment with Ad Rem. The advanced separation tech supplier continues to upgrade and innovate. At the International Electronics Recycling Congress (IERC 2026) in Valencia, Spain, company sales engineer Jelle Saint-Germain took the expo hall stage to unveil ‘Owl’, an automated system for next level quality control of plastic flakes, including black plastics.

‘Owl was developed to deal with a few fundamental difficulties when analysing plastic flakes,’ says Saint-Germain. ‘For example, detailed analysis is often done manually and is therefore time intensive. An operator picks up a flake, puts it on a detection mechanism, waits up to a minute, then takes the flake away and processes the data. As you can image, this is very costly in terms of manpower.’

Different databases

Another thing, the engineer notes, is that there is no integrated way to analyse flakes. ‘You need one device to determine the plastic type, another to determine the embedded molecules or atoms, and so on. The data is spread around different databases for all these different devices. There is no data coupling, meaning you don’t know which particle contains which elements across the different sampling technologies.’

Black plastics

According to Saint-Germain, there is also a lack of uniform sample preparation. What’s more, commercially available automated systems use near infrared (NIR). ‘This has some serious shortcomings, for example in detecting black plastics, which is often the majority of the material when considering e-scrap or auto shredder residue (ASR).’

Pressed rolls

Ad Rem took on the challenge to develop a system – Owl – that eliminates all these issues. First, plastic flakes or re-granulates are prepared through a set of pressed rolls. The rolls flatten the flakes, making sure the surface is not an obstacle for detection. This also makes the flakes easier to pick up.

The prepared flakes are added to a tray which is inserted into the Owl. Here, a gantry picks the flake, placing it onto the sensors and bringing it back automatically.

Two sensors are combined: first, there is an XRF analyser, using X-rays to detect elements such as bromine, chlorine or antimony. The second sensor is a spectrometer (FTIR), using infrared waves to determine the type of plastic. The sensors are commercially available models.

Excellent night vision

A modern visualisation shows the compositional and elemental information in real-time, both on individual flake and batch level. The data from the instruments is combined and ‘safely’ stored, to be exported when needed. ‘Using Owl, even black plastics can easily be analysed,’ says Saint-Germain. ‘That’s why we named it ‘Owl’; the owl is famous for its night vision.’

Samples & demos

The Owl was developed within a joint research project by the University of Leuven, VITO, Galloo and Ad Rem. For the project, more over 10 000 samples of plastic flakes were mapped and analysed over the course of many months. Demonstrations of the Owl will be given at the Plastics Recycling Show Europe (PRSE) on 5-6 May in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.