Abstract
Construction waste is known to include a large part of coarse and fine aggregates, which can be recirculated in the industry. Separating those aggregates economically from the waste has been thus considered to be one of the most important issues in this field. In particular, paste mixed in the waste causes significant complain from the inhabitants living near the place where waste-processing equipments are built and operated. In this study, we investigate the operational principle of a newly developed paste separator by using theoretical (in this first part) and CFD (in the second part) analysis. The separator consists of a rotor which turned out to play a significant role in separating those pastes from the aggregates. Under suitable assumptions regarding the air flow velocity as well as the particle velocity, we show that particles can be stagnant at the outlet of the roto channel for a wide range of parameter values, which allow the particles to get enough time to settle down via the gravitation. We also demonstrate such phenomenon by using a simple numerical simulation.