IMECE2005-81358 ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONIC EQUIPMENT RECOVERY AND RECYCLING IN TURKEY

ABSTRACT Discarded electrical and electronic equipment contains valuable materials, low value parts, and hazardous substances

Electrical and electronic equipment recovery and recycling in Turkey

Discarded electrical and electronic equipment contains valuable materials, low value parts, and hazardous substances. There is a growing concern regarding the management of end-of-use equipment owing to the environmental concerns associated with discarding used devices. Electronic waste or scrap consumes valuable landfill space and may ultimately contaminate groundwater sources. In addition, replacing discarded components with new components typically consumes valuable virgin material resources. With the advent of the WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) Directive, used electrical and electronic products are now being recovered in Turkey as a European Union (EU) candidate country, and several companies in Turkey have begun to recover latent value through disassembly and reuse/recycling of materials and components. To remain competitive, these companies must implement economical and environmentally responsible recovery processes. There are a number of research challenges associated with product recovery. This paper describes the current product recovery infrastructure in Turkey, and discusses future trends and drivers for successful product take-back. Copyright © 2005 by ASME

Integration of Physical Devices into Game-based Virtual Reality

Virtual reality (VR) systems have the potential for alleviating the existing constraints on various natural and social resources. Currently, real-time applications of VR systems are hampered by the tediousness of creating virtual environments. Furthermore, todayâ??s VR systems only stimulate the human senses of vision, hearing and â?? to some extent touch â?? which prevents the system users to feel fully immersed in the virtual environment. By integrating real physical devices with virtual environments, the user interactions with such systems can be improved and advanced technologies such as the MS Kinect system could be used to augment the environments themselves. While existing development platforms for VR systems are expensive, game engines provide a more efficient method for integrating VR with physical devices. In this paper, an efficient approach for integrating virtual environments and physical devices is presented. This approach employs modifications of games that are based on commercially available game engines for implementing the virtual environments in conjunction with the application of Dynamic Link Libraries (DLLs) for realizing versatile communications between these virtual environments and various application platforms, which in turn can interact with the physical devices outside of the virtual environments. This paper is divided into four sections. In the first section, the motivation for the developments described here is discussed, followed by a description of the method used to integrate virtual environments with physical devices in the second section. In the third section, an interactive and collaborative laboratory environment based on a multi-player computer game engine that is linked to physical experimental setups is presented as an example of a VR system. In the final section, some additional promising applications of the developed platform and the corresponding challenges are briefly introduced

Towards sustainable product and material flow cycles: Identifying barriers to achieving product multi-use and zero waste

Material and energy resource consumption is on the rise in both the industrialized and developing world (e.g., countries like India and China). In order to sustain this growth and provide resources for future generations, there is a need to design products that are easy to recover and recondition, thus enabling multiple use cycles. Processes are needed that can achieve this multi-use while producing zero (or very near zero) waste. There exist a number of barriers and challenges to achieving this vision of multi-use with zero waste; one such challenge is the development of a product recovery infrastructure that will minimize short-term impacts due to existing products and will be robust enough to recover products of the future. This paper identifies the barriers to developing such a recovery and reuse infrastructure. The aim is to achieve product multi-use and zero waste. Copyright © 2005 by ASME

New analytical and numerical optical model for the laser assisted tape winding process

New analytical and numerical optical models are proposed for the laser assisted tape winding (LATW) of thermoplastic composites. The irradiation and reflection of the laser beam directly influence the heat flux and temperature distribution during the consolidation, hence the laser optics must be described and understood well for improved bonding quality. For the first time, a two-dimensional (2D) analytical solution is derived for the laser light distribution and reflection by combining the principle of energy conversation with unpolarized Fresnel equations. In the more comprehensive numerical model, a 3D ray tracing approach is incorporated in which a novel non-specular reflection model is developed predicting the anisotropic reflective behaviour of the composite. Heat flux distributions for the substrate and incoming tape are calculated. The analytical and numerical model results are shown to correspond. The non-specular and scattering reflection yields in a larger illuminated area with lower intensity for substrate and tape