Method and apparatus for sorting fibers
AssigneeToyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America, Inc.
InventorUMESH N. GANDHI
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Abstract
A method of determining the length distribution in the population of glass or plastic fibers in, for example, a fiber reinforced polymeric article wherein the fibers recovered from a representative article are immersed in a non-polar liquid and the combination of the liquid and fibers is passed through a sieve stack while an applied high electric field produces a relatively uniform alignment of the fibers as they pass through the sieves thereby improving the accuracy of the filtering process.
Claims7
A method of determining the length distribution of fibers in a collection of fibers comprising the steps of:
- immersing the fibers in a non-polar liquid;
- passing the fibers through a stack of sieves wherein each sieve represents and collects a different progressively shorter fiber length while, at the same time, applying an electric field to immersed fibers prior to passing through at least one of the sieves;
- and
- quantifying the collected fibers in each sieve in the stack.
Apparatus for sorting fibers recovered from a fiber-reinforced plastic article comprising:
- a stack of sorting sieves with progressively graduated filtering sizes;
- means for causing a mix of fibers in a non-polar liquid to flow through the stack;
- and
- means for applying an electric field to at least one location in the stack to align the fibers in a predetermined direction relative to at least one sieve while flowing through the stack.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.