OWL - Plastic flake analyzer

Ad Rem is proud to present their latest development: the “Owl”: an automated system for better quality control of plastic flakes. The system was developed to deal with a few fundamental difficulties when analysing plastic flakes:

• Detailed analysis is often time intensive and manual. 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. This is very costly in terms of manpower.
• 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.
• There is no uniform sample preparation.
• Commercially available automated systems use NIR which has some serious shortcomings, for example with the detection of black plastics, which is often the majority of the material when considering WEEE or ASR plastics.

That’s why Ad Rem took on the challenge of developing a system that eliminates all these issues.

First, plastic flakes or regranulates are prepared through a set of pressed rolls. The rolls flatten the flakes, making sure the surface is not a hindrance for the 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 comes in and picks the flake, placing it onto the sensors and back fully automatically.

Two sensors are combined: first, there is an XRF analyzer, 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.

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, and can be exported when needed. Using the Owl, even black plastics can easily be analyzed (hence the name: the owl is famous for its night vision).

Here are a few use cases:

The first use case is a detailed analysis of different input materials to optimize process flows and compare supplied materials. In many cases, a significant amount of material is black, and the amount of black versus non-black plastics is not consistent across different plastic types. This means that a traditional flake analyser using NIR would not be able to make a good analysis. Typically it would ignore the black plastics and extrapolate the data it gets from the non-black plastics, but this would yield a skewed result. By being able to detect the black plastics correctly, a plastics recycler will be able to pay a fair and correct price to their suppliers based on what is actually inside of their mix, instead of skewed assumptions.

A second use case is that the bromine content is tracked for all analysed flakes. This means that the Owl can find which individual particles contain bromine and quantify the content rather than seeing the average bromine content from an extruded mix after compounding, which is quite often too late. You can also see which exact particles and plastic types contain the bromine. This is a major advantage, and in fact the only way to meet the future stricter bromine and POPs legal targets.

Another use case is to monitor a recycler’s output and process quality. Using the Owl makes it effortless to do quality control on your sorting operations. Just take a sample of around 50 flakes, put them in the machine, and let it run for an hour, and you will have all the real-time detailed data on plastic and elemental composition. This way you can immediately see if the production process is working well, or if adjustments need to be made. This goes for separation efficiency and yields but also for quality control in terms of bromine or POPs content.

A final use case is that contrary to NIR detection, with this combination of sampling technologies you can also detect specific fillers such as calcium carbonate, talcum, or glass fiber.

The Owl was developed in the context of a research project between the university of Leuven, VITO, Galloo and Ad Rem. For this project, over ten thousand samples of plastic flakes were mapped and analysed over the course of many months. When purchasing the Owl, it comes with a library of reference spectra for ASR and WEEE plastics. This library can be used to compare your own samples with industry baselines.

This unique combination of automated analysis equipment, combined with the process know-how of Ad Rem opens many more use cases. The Owl was first presented at the IERC conference in January 2026, and live demos will be given at PRS in Amsterdam, in May. The Owl is patent pending. It is already commercially available.