Hardox® makes the cut in glass recycling equipment

Doing away with waste isn’t just about handling the waste that equipment eats up every day – it’s also about wasted time and money due to equipment downtime. Many recycling and recovery professionals are finding that one source of waste they can control is the quality of the equipment they operate.

To remain competitive, glass recyclers have got to minimize equipment wear. As a result, they are constantly looking for an optimal balance between service life and lifecycle cost.

The wear-resistant materials used in glass recycling equipment and plants – such as ceramics and chromium carbide overlay plates – have high wear resistance. But they are expensive, both to purchase and to maintain. So simply achieving the longest service life is not an appropriate strategy to ensure profitability. Lifecycle cost also has to be taken into account. This is given by the cost of the equipment and its maintenance divided by its service life. A third factor is maintenance – the cost of materials and labor to keep the equipment operational.

Also, no dust from the wear-resistant material must be allowed to degrade the finished product.

SSAB’s wear test rig confirmed that Hardox® Extreme was more wear resistant than chromium carbide overlay.

SSAB’s commitment to making extremely clean steels enables us to offer a product that far outperforms typical 450-500 HBW wear-resistant steels. With a nominal hardness of 60 HRC (Rockwell) and a typical hardness of 650-700 HBW, SSAB’s Hardox® Extreme – the world’s hardest wear plate – meets the demanding requirements of glass recycling plants.

To fully understand the abrasive environment of glass recycling and the performance of different wear-resistant materials, SSAB developed its own wear test for crushed glass. Some of our findings were even published in the special issue of the journal Wear for the 20th International Conference on Wear of Materials in Toronto.

The SSAB wear test rig consists of an 800 x 100 mm (3.15 x 3.94”) steel drum with up to 34 samples placed in a holder mounted around the internal circumference of the drum. All tests were conducted under the same conditions.

A number of wear-resistant materials were tested under sliding wear conditions using crushed glass from a glass recycling plant in Sweden. The test revealed that SSAB’s wear-resistant grade Hardox® Extreme performed well, outperforming materials such as chromium carbide overlay.

One of the first glass recycling plants to trial Hardox® Extreme was a facility in Scotland. The SSAB technical development team and Hardox Wearparts Centre Stirling Ltd. in Stirling, Scotland, collaborated closely with the customer. The results were excellent, offering both reduced lifecycle cost and extended service life. The project also acted as a platform for trialing other problematic wear zones in the facility, such as drop-pockets in impact zones.