I don´t want to ruin your point, but imagine doing it piece by piece to nearly 800 000 pieces.
795 000 sim cards yield--pls help to calculate
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Didn't say it is the best way, but may be more convenient than incinerating whole card, creating a lot of ash which will make following wet chemistry pain in the butt.
With back of the envelope calculation - it looks like one block to process lenght is est. 900mm, with avg. thickness of 0.75mm gives us roughly 1200 cards in one package, lets say 1000 for easier calc... This means around 800 packages. With process time of 1 min for one cut (overestimated) it's 2 mandays, for 4 cuts it's 8 mandays - not much for getting rid of ~95% plastic, just saying
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I get you, I understand that. But time is expensive resource. And if you do have good experience with these kinds of material, you know that you will never efficiently process it by hydrometallurgy. Never hydro on "inert" powders.Didn't say it is the best way, but may be more convenient than incinerating whole card, creating a lot of ash which will make following wet chemistry pain in the butt.
With back of the envelope calculation - it looks like one block to process lenght is est. 900mm, with avg. thickness of 0.75mm gives us roughly 1200 cards in one package, lets say 1000 for easier calc... This means around 800 packages. With process time of 1 min for one cut (overestimated) it's 2 mandays, for 4 cuts it's 8 mandays - not much for getting rid of ~95% plastic, just saying
We don´t speak about hobby refining here, this is pure profit thing, if it is not there, I won´t do 800 000 pieces of some low grade material.
From regular plastic, you won´t have practically none ash. From opaque plastic (obviously with some kind of filler), you get a decent ammount. But filler is usually light and cheap material like silica, titania or limestone. Which is easily wash away from the metallic portion.
Chemicals are last resort in large scale. Because chemicals are expensive. But there is one more expensive thing - and that is your labor and time. With scale, it somewhat shrinks, yeah, but it is still there.
I won´t ever trim 800 000 cards by hand. Period. Maybe there is somebody who will be willing to do that, but I certainly won´t.
Something that might work…. This material could be added a little at a time to other materials such as IC’s, that are typically run through pyrometallurgy. For a small, home refining material I do this with odd pieces that I seldom have enough to process by themselves. Commercially it might not work as you need proper accounting for the customers materials and may pose a problem there. But a proper test lot could help determine whether this would be viable also. The few cards like these I have done were run this way after the first batch due to the low recovery from them. The shear number of cards here would be more of a deterrent than a help to me.
Just thinking out loud here but that is a huge amount of plastics for a home refiner to deal with.
Just thinking out loud here but that is a huge amount of plastics for a home refiner to deal with.
Raw chemicals are dirty cheap, large IB container or rail tank of nitric is like 100 fold less than buying ACS grade reagents by bottles, but you probably already know this. This type of plastic is definitely filler, so huge amount of ash - not practical to smelt as you previously suggested so I assumed wet chemistry. With just kernels incinerated, collector smelting is much more feasible.
Considering manpower it won't work in my country (EU), but according to script on the pictured card which is more eastern located it may pan out...
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# I won´t ever trim 800 000 cards by hand. Period. Maybe there is somebody who will be willing to do that, but I certainly won´t.
You probably don't get it, 800000 cards one by one was never an option, but one block (1000ish cards) with 4 cuts on formatting table saw.
