Design of fuzzy radial basis function neural network classifier based on information data preprocessing for recycling black plastic wastes: comparative studies of ATR FT-IR and Raman spectroscopy

As large amounts of plastics are widely used in diverse areas of industry, the amount of plastic waste, including black plastics, continues to increase. In this situation, the necessity of useful recycling having limited resources gradually increases. The design of plastic classification systems for plastics recycling becomes more important to effectively address recycling activities. Until now, conventional sorting systems based on the near infrared ray technology have been used to classify plastic wastes. However, the classification of black plastic waste still remains a challenge because such materials do not reflect sufficient signals due to the absorption of laser light coming from the NIR spectrometer. In order to solve such problems, this research is focused on an efficient way to identify black plastics. Attenuated Total Reflectance (ATR) Fourier Transform Infrared Radiation (FT-IR) and a Raman spectrometer are used to carry out qualitative and quantitative analysis for the effective as well as efficient classification of black plastic wastes. In this study, to effectively classify the black plastic waste, data processing and Fuzzy Transform (F-Transform) as well as PCA-based Fuzzy Radial Basis Function Neural Networks (FRBFNNs) classifier is proposed. Input variables extracted on a basis of chemical characteristic peaks as well as interval range positioned near the chemical characteristic peaks were exploited as a way to improve the classification performance of the FRBFNN classifier. In order to evaluate the performance of the classifier, a suite of techniques including F-Transform-based as well as Principal Component Analysis (PCA)-based FRBFNNs classifier designed with the aid of Particle Swam Optimization are developed to analyze and classify black plastics.