This paper presents the investigation of metals production form artificial ore, which consists of printed circuit board (PCB) waste, processed in plasmatron plasma reactor. A test setup was designed and built that enabled research of plasma processing of PCB waste of more than 700 kg/day scale. The designed plasma process is presented and discussed. The process in tests consumed 2 kWh/kg of processed waste. Investigation of the process products is presented with their elemental analyses of metals and slag. The average recovery of metals in presented experiments is 76%. Metals recovered include: Ag, Au, Pd, Cu, Sn, Pb, and others. The chosen process parameters are presented: energy consumption, throughput, process temperatures, and air consumption. Presented technology allows processing of variable and hard-to-process printed circuit board waste that can reach up to 100% of the input mass.
Abstract:Microwave devices are widely used in the industry and in the specialized laboratory analyses. Development of such devices requires the possibility of modeling of microwave energy distribution in the specific resonant chambers. Until now, such modeling was possible only with the use of commercial software or was limited to specific cases. The paper presents an open-source module for ELMER software for solving timeharmonic Maxwell's equations, allowing modeling of microwave waveguide lines. Three test cases of different resonant chambers are investigated at 2.45 GHz frequency. Modeling results obtained from the open-source ELMER Vectorial Helmholtz module show that the application of this software can be effective in R&D works, enabling high-tech small and medium enterprises involvement in advanced microwave technology.
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