Development of Digital Twin-based WEEE Recycling Workshop: Initial Approaches and Future Challenges

The global use of electronic devices has been increasing dramatically, followed by a large amount of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE). Converting the e-waste into raw materials for new products offers a great opportunity for the value chain of WEEE. However, the limited knowledge of diversified individual products and the systematic modeling approach of recycling workshop challenges the recycling practice. In addition, valuable target elements can be easily lost during mechanical processes, making it crucial to maximize recycling efficiencies and increase the financial returns of WEEE recycling. Given the above mentioned, digital twin technology is adopted to develop an integrated modeling approach for the WEEE recycling workshop in this paper. Firstly, the architecture and characteristics of the digital twin-based WEEE recycling workshop are introduced; Secondly, several digital twins are defined to model individual recycling processes (i.e., disassembly, size-reduction, separation, etc.); and finally, a case study of the PCB separation digital twin model is presented to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed methodologies.