Whether it is in sorting defects from grain in an agricultural setting, ore from tailings in a mine, or letters in a postal system, the sorting of bulk material has long been a crucial aspect of human industry.  Today, in the face of dwindling natural resource deposits and accelerating climate change, a particularly important application of bulk material sorting is in the solid waste recycling industry.  In modern solid waste recycling, Material Recovery Facilities (“MRFs”) separate post-consumer waste streams into single material products for use in manufacturing.  MRFs face a number of challenges including difficulties with staffing, contamination, and highly variable process infeeds, to the point where the average American MRF only achieves roughly 60% of its design throughput.  To address these issues, in this work we describe a novel framework for state representation of transient material flows in MRFs and we provide examples of how our framework can be used to design systems for real-time measurement, state estimation, and control of these systems.  We provide results both in simulation and in physical experiment which suggest process throughput increases on the order of 40%.  We then discuss the implications of this work for the recycling industry as well as suggest direction for future work.

Committee:
Dr. Matthew Travers (advisor)
Dr. Howie Choset
Prasanna Kettavarapalyam Sriganesh