Plastic is a widely accessible material, yet its waste poses major environmental pollution and landfill space exhaustion problems. Recovering the materials needed to create new plastic products, such as lumber, containers, and particle boards, is the goal of the recycling process for waste plastic. To begin, the plastic trash must be shredded into smaller bits so that it can be more easily transported and processed.
Substances and Techniques
Since plastic bottles take up more space than other scraps although weighing less, the scrap collector typically avoids accepting them. Crushing or slicing this plastic makes transporting it easier and cheaper for scrap collectors, and the resulting pieces can be use in a plastic bottle shredder right away.
Theory of Operation
With a rotary cutting tool, the bottle crusher separates the components of bottles within a predetermined depth and maximum speed range, after which the two components are either discarded separately or the bottle is truncated. The shredder is composed of a feeding unit, a shredding unit, and a power transmission device that can transmit 2 horsepower of single-phase power.
Making a Cutting Instrument
Welded directly to the shaft are the seventeen tools that make up the tool set. The cutter is made from spring steel. Laser cutting a thin sheet of spring steel yields these cutters. The cutter has a spiral design that aids in gripping and shearing.
Crafting a Cutter Shaft
There are 17 blades evenly spaced along the shaft, all soldered in place. Detail of the design is depicted in Figure 5. Sharpening blades are made of mild steel. The shaft is supported on both ends by ball bearings. The shaft is 595 mm long and 45 mm wide. Figure 6 displays the manufactured version of the final model.
Cartridge Shredder
The large plates of the shredder box’s construction make up its distinctive appearance. Everyone in the room The machine can crush bottles of various sizes because it was built to do so. The machine usually only takes about half the volume of the bottle away. The machine was tested, and it was discovered that it could also smash cans and bottles.
Variables Apart
The machine is powered by a 1.5-horsepower AC motor. The energy created by the motor is transferred to the shaft. The main shaft speed of the motor can be reduced to as low as 50 revolutions per minute from its original 1440.
Gears
Two spur gears are employed. The cutting shaft gear is larger than the intermediate shaft gear. That’s why the main shaft must slow down once more. Locally sourced materials were used to design and build a bottle shredder that will reduce the size of commercially used plastic bottles or prepare them for further processing.
Calculation
This allowed us to calculate both the starting and ending volumes by simply measuring the bottles. Percentage volume reduction is shown in the table below. The shredder’s intermediate shaft, which is like the cutter shaft, is located beneath the box. This is where the power transmission pulley is located. The cast iron utilized in the construction of the shredder.