Cutting HDPE Tote Hot Wire

[Trevor Williams]

I am looking for help in ascertaining if a large hollow HDPE (330 Gallon Tote – metal frame removed) could be cut with a hot wire prior to shredding.

I envisage it being pulled/pushed through a tunnel with 1 - 3 vertical wires.

Any advice you could give me would be appreciated.

This would be a simple way to reduce, safely, the size of the tote for further reduction in the, not large enough for a full tote, hopper of the shredder line.

 

[Pud]

How many do you need to cut up?
A hand held electric jigsaw with a coarse blade will make short work of one or two.


Politicians like to panic, they need activity. It is their substitute for achievement.

 

[Trevor Williams]

There is a need to process a tote every 7 minutes to feed a Crusher / Shredder which then feeds a pelletizer to generate a saleable recycled raw material.
Also a desire to minimize the amount of labour.
Do you think that a hot wire cutter set-up would be an achievable objective?

 

[TugboatEng]

That would be a very long, unsupported wire. It could be too weak at the temperature required. A tensioning system that can keep the wire tight over a wide range of temperatures would be a must. The energy consumption might be very high. A band saw arrangement might be ideal.

 

[itsmoked]

Cutting it up first is problematic due to the aforementioned wire failures and the stench it will cause. It will also take a lot of maintenance.

Sawing it will generate a lot of "saw dust" that will have to be handled. It will also raise the ambient noise level and require blade changes.

You'd be much better off with a hydraulic compactor that smashes it flat then folds it over a third and then the other third. Then you feed the resulting "plank" into your shredder. This method will also help you with inevitable failures of the shredder as you can easily stack a few days of planks up whereas the other two options would make gigantic hard to manage piles. Lastly a crusher has half the footprint the wires or saw methods would require as they need about twice the tote length to hold the tote ahead of the process and then the pieces of the cut tote on the output.

Keith Cress
kcress -

http://www.flaminsystems.com