Abstract
This work aimed to characterize the deportment/concentration and liberation/association of the metals and light elements within mechanically processed waste printed circuit boards (PCBs) that hold the complex and heterogeneous structure and distribution of different material components. Waste PCBs passed through a series of mechanical processing (i.e., comminution and sieving) for metal recovery and were then characterized without further destroying the particles in order to capture their heterogeneity. The characterizations were performed in a laboratory and large-scale neutron facility. The results obtained with a portable X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy and prompt gamma activation analysis were compared and confirmed the good agreement and complementarities in general. The advantages and disadvantages of the two different methods were identified and discussed in this paper, in relation to their application to the analysis of mechanically processed PCB particles.
Highlights
Waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) is one of the fast growing waste categories in the European Union, with the growth rate of 3%–5% per year [1]
Such discrepancies were anticipated beforehand, including one of our major interests upon working with the prompt gamma ray neutron activation analysis (PGAA) to characterize the light elements within a complex assemblage of printed circuit boards (PCBs) particles, e.g., Hydrogen, Carbon, Boron, and Nitrogen that cannot be detected by X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF)
The decrease in metal deportment and the plastic predominance for particle size below 0.5 mm agreed with the results reported by Eswaraiah et al [6], who performed sink-float tests to evaluate the performance of separating crushed PCBs particles by air classification
Summary
Waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) is one of the fast growing waste categories in the European Union, with the growth rate of 3%–5% per year [1]. It is about three times higher than the rate of municipal waste. One of the major limitations is the lack of proper characterization methods to quantitatively evaluate the distribution and liberation/association of different components that vary and be spatially different/heterogeneous, without destroying the particle status at each beneficiation step [3]. We propose one solution to address this characterization issue using the large-scale facility with neutron sources, in comparison and complement with conventional laboratory equipment
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