Levitated Metals has installed laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) sorter to sort wrought aluminum from cast aluminum at its New Caney, Texas, facility.

Levitated Metals operates a heavy media plant since 2021, producing low-magnesium and low-iron twitch from zorba and zorba fines that it buys from auto shredding operations. In addition to twitch, the company produces zebra heavies (a mixture of brass, copper, zinc, nonmagnetic stainless steel and copper wire) and zeppelin (a mixture of magnesium and aluminum) that it markets to smelters and processors in the U.S., Mexico and overseas.

Now, Levitated Metals is marketing vesper, or aluminum sheet, extrusion and/or plate grades, that it is producing from zorba that it first upgrades to twitch using its heavy media plant. 

LIBS technology is poised to transform the scrap recycling industry with high expectations

The President Ronak Shah of Levitated Metals said “The quality expectations that our customers have are far beyond most things that anyone in our industry has to deal with,” he says. “We're making a lowest-common-denominator product, twitch, into a highly specialized product: low-silicon 3X shreds. It takes an absolute manufacturing quality approach to be able to make product of a quality that they would like to see, and, in our particular case, we focus a lot on that,” including polishing the material to improve its aesthetics. 

“We do it because when you walk around any rolling mill, everything is very clean and nice and safe, and they have clean sheets of scrap, clean areas of scrap and RSI [remelt scrap ingot] sows that are explicitly known chemistries. If we're going to break into that world, we have to provide product of a quality commensurate with their expectation, and that's a big delta from what expectations sometimes are in our industry.”

Material is polished and sized prior to entering the LIBS line, with Shah noting that bigger pieces of shredded aluminum generally are wrought, while smaller pieces typically are cast as that material tends to shatter upon impact in the shredder given its more brittle nature. 

“Our goal as a company is to make the product that our aluminum customers are looking to buy from raw sources of recycled materials that are not available to them today,” Shah says.

The advantage of LIBS sorter is the speed, at which the lasers fire and that the unit has four of them. Each laser is more than capable of shooting at over 100 pieces a second, and there's four of them, and that's more pieces than you could even put on the belt per second.

Greensort also dedicated to develop the LIBS technology, and its at the final stage of the equipment lunch. Send your material to us for the testing, we will bring you unexpecte performance.