Separation the Impurities from Descurainia Seed using Electrostatic Method in a Fluid Bed (Tribo-airo-electrostatic)

The presence of various impurities leads to the problems in storage time, transmission, selling and consumption process of any product. Thus it is necessary to separate the impurities from the product for industrial processing. Descurainia Sophia is a tiny grain seed in light brown color with elliptical shape and it grown up in humid climate. Electrostatic method is a proper way for separation and purification of materials which is based on the absorption and diffusion of charged particles in an electrical field with high voltage. An experimental research was carried out for recycling the plastic waste with tribo-electric system. The result of the research on plastic separation of waste materials showed that by increasing the voltage of the system the purification fold increases. The results of the effect of the applied voltage for recycling the plastic particles showed that by increasing the applied voltage in the electrodes the mass and purity of the polycarbonate (PC) increased and the mass and purity of polyamide (PA) decreased. There is a little information about separation and purification of fine grain seeds and this study is about separating of Descurainia Sophia seed and the effect of the parameters using regression analysis.   Descurainiaseed samples were collected from the farms located in Mahan city of Kerman province, Iran. Tribo-airo-electrostatic system contains of funnel and feeding container, the charger unit, the separating unit, air transmission channels and gathering unit. Charging unit consists of two aluminum electrode connected to a high voltage DC power supply adjustable between 0-100 kV. A blower was used to suspend material and increase the exposure time of particles in the electric field. The gathering is a box with different partitions divided by wooden sheets. Separated particles fall in the gaps based on the amounts of charges, weight and shape. The separating process takes place by considering physical properties. There are two important forces that acts on the falling of the object in electric field; the electric force acts in the horizontal direction, gravitational force acts in the vertical direction. Considering the purity of the separated seeds in the box, only four sections of the box were selected for size and frequency analysis. For obtaining gathered seed impurity, the digital pictures of the gathered samples imported in Matlab6.5 software and were analyzed using Image processing toolbar based on the differences between seed and impurity color. For regression analysis of the parameters voltage in the electrodes, the distance of the electrodes, the angle of the electrode and the mass of the boxes was considered. Laser diffraction method used for determination the size of separated particles and for this purpose FRITSCH Laser Particle Size Analyser -ANALYSETTE 22 NanoTec system was used.   The results illustrated that the Descurainiaseed takes negative charge and moves to the positive electrode and impure particles takes positive charge and moves to the negative electrode. The purity calculations of the experiments showed that the average percentage of box No.1 is more than 98%, box No.2 is between 65%-75%, box No.3 is between 30% to 50% and box No.4 is less than 50%. The values of correlation coefficient of the effective parameters for box No.1 was 90% and this means that 90% of the parameters of equation affected on the weight of the box No.1 for about 90%. By increasing the applied voltage and the angle of the electrodes of the separating unit and decreasing the distance of the electrodes, the purity of box increases. The size analysis of Descurainiaseed showed that the particles with larger dimensions take more negative charge and moves to negative electrode. The results of the study showed that tribo-airo-electrostatic system separated Descurainiaseed from waste particles properly. By considering the optimum value of separating parameters the purification increased by 98%. According to the results it can be stated that this system can be used for separation and purification of small grains such as alfalfa and clover.