#	Pagina
attuale pagina	/open-h2020/projects/198364/results.html

Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ADIR (Next generation urban mining - Automated disassembly, separation and recovery of valuable materials from electronic equipment)

Teaser

Summary

Specific raw materials become increasingly important to manufacture high level industrial products. Especially electronic equipment contains precious metals and a series of strategic raw materials. To date the material specific recycling is focused on masstream concepts such as shredder processes and metallurgy to extract the high-value metallic constituents, i.e. gold, silver, copper. However, a series of critical elements cannot be recovered efficiently or is even lost in dust or residual fractions as, e.g. tantalum.

In Europe rare materials as tantalum, indium, gallium, germanium etc. have to be imported because no mining and ore deposits exist. The recovery of such metals by the recycling of old electronic equipment grants the possibility to open a new source and closes the loop for a sustainable availability of such metals.

The goal of ADIR is to demonstrate the feasibility of a key technology for next generation urban mining. An automated disassembly of electronic equipment will be worked out to separate and recover valuable materials.

Work performed

Within the first reporting period, the work of the consortium concentrated on the requirement analysis and the process development.

The partners analysed the WEEE originating from mobile phones, selected mobile phones as well as individual electronic components to identify the most relevant species for elemental recycling. From this detailed analysis the requirements for the automated recovery processes were derived considering the technical and economical constraints.

The individual processes were developed by the consortium and demonstrated on lab scale. Automated robotic handling and dismantling of mobile phones extracts the PCB and other modules. The PCBs, also from other sources, are fed into an inspection system which determines the mounted components, including an information about the chemical content. A subsequent laser-unsoldering process extracts the selected components and collects them into fractions of enriched elemental composition. Metallurgical processing routes are worked out for the most efficient recovery of the valuable constituents of each sorting fraction.

Within the second reporting period, a set of machines was designed and set-up for the following process steps:

a) feeding of singularised mobile phones coming from a bunker or of printed circuit boards from servers/computers on a conveyor belt up to a take over position;

b.1) picking of the singularised mobile phones by a robot to feed a machine for the mechanical disassembly of these phones including extraction of the battery and allocation of the battery to a first sorting fraction; finally, the printed circuit board (PCB) of the mobile phone is taken out and passed on to a manipulator, which transfers this PCB to the subsequent machines;

b.2) picking of the singularised printed circuit board from servers by a manipulator and transfer of this board to the subsequent machines;

c) the manipulator puts the PCB in a loading zone of a measuring machine, where highly resolved 2D and 3D images of the PCB are taken and evaluated; on selected electronic components mounted on these PCB laser spectroscopic measurements are carried out to identify valuable target elements; geometric data and chemical data are fed to a data base; via a software a component list is generated describing those electronic components which shall be detached selectively from the PCB in the subsequent machine;

d) the PCB is transferred by the manipulator to the next machine, where - based on the component list (cf. c)) - by use of the laser processes of unsoldering or cutting the selected electronic components are detached from the PCB, separated and allocated to a set of sorting fractions.

The machines were interlinked to set-up the ADIR demonstrator. This demonstrator will be used in 2019 for field tests.

Metallurgical process routes to recover valuable elements from the sorting fractions of the ADIR demonstrator were further studied and the corresponding flowsheets were validated.

Final results

The consortium has developed processes not available before and demonstrated their feasibility. In the next innovation steps the processes will be implemented and refined to demonstrate their capabilities. The innovations will make available new pathways for electronic waste treatment and new resources for sustainable industrial development in Europe.