Solid material comminution or disintegration – Processes – With classifying or separating of material
Reexamination Certificate
1999-07-27
2001-09-18
Rosenbaum, Mark (Department: 3725)
Solid material comminution or disintegration
Processes
With classifying or separating of material
C241S024220, C241S099000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06290153
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
It is a labor intensive and a time consuming task to manually extract glass bottles from their cardboard cases and then introduce the bottles to a second piece of equipment to grind or break the glass for further recycling processes.
There is a large and immediate need in the beverage distribution industry to reduce hand labor and time in emptying cases of returned bottles and in preparing the bottles for recycling. Robotic machines for opening and emptying cases are not suitable.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The invention solves the case emptying and glass bottle recycling by using equipment which is new and unique in the beverage distributor industry.
This invention provides the use of trommels in recycling cased empty bottles of beer and other beverages. Trommel screens are used in decasing and processing beverage bottles for recycling.
A trommel is a generally horizontally mounted slightly downwardly and rearwardly sloped rotating screened drum. The invention provides a trommel that receives cased glass bottles for the purpose of decasing, breaking the bottles into fines, and separating the cardboard cases from the dumped bottles and ground (broken) glass. The trommel drums are created as a structural framework, then dressed with a heavy duty woven wire screen cloth with high strength bolt fasteners. The screen cloth is typically steel with a 0.192 wire size or larger, pre-rolled to conform to the framework. Various screen opening sizes are selected by the end user to produce the desired end product. In this case the openings are selected to match the desired size of the broken glass pieces.
The invention solves the existing problems by introducing a trommel into the decasing and bottle breaking process. In lieu of a manual process or expensive robotics to pull bottles from their cases, full cases are placed on a feed conveyor which in turn loads the feed hopper of the trommel. The trommel lifts and tumbles the full cases through the employment of lifting tubes, which are longitudinally extending parts of the rotating drum framework. The lifting tubes tip and tumble the cases repeatedly, thus extracting and dumping the bottles from the cases and breaking bottles against the screens, the lifting tubes and the trommel internal framework. The bottles and broken bottles are lifted, tumbled and dropped within the trommel until the glass pieces are reduced in size. Broken glass particles then pass through the screen cloth, which is the cylindrical surface of the trommel. Conveyors move the broken glass to stock piles or glass bins or containers. Empty cardboard cases are carried through the trommel drum to its discharge end onto a stacking conveyor, which feeds a cardboard compactor/baler. Trommel screen openings may be of sufficient size to pass unbroken or partially broken bottles, but it is preferable to reduce glass to sizes which permit compact shipping by truck or rail to glass plants and which provide the most economically advantageous pre-processing sizes.
Trommel screens have been tested and have proven successful in the case emptying and glass-cardboard separation for recycling application.
These and further and other objects and features of the invention are apparent in the disclosure, which includes the above and ongoing written specification, with the claims and the drawings.
REFERENCES:
patent: 3946953 (1976-03-01), Hato
patent: 4018675 (1977-04-01), Petrucci
patent: 4069979 (1978-01-01), Morita et al.
patent: 4178232 (1979-12-01), Nollet
patent: 4795103 (1989-01-01), Lech
Creighton Wray James
Narasimhan Meera P.
Rosenbaum Mark
Terex Corporation
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