Non-Chemical PCBs pulverized shaker table

[kjavanb123]

All,

I have been busy experimenting with shaking table and pulverized PCBs. My homemade pulverizer takes in the whole board and pulverizes it to 60% fine powder and 40% -30 mesh.
Mixed the -30 mesh materials and ran them through my homemade shaker table, it cleaned the plastics and fiberglass from the grinded metallics. Table got clogged since I did not put any filtering for water pump, so some of the plastics from boards clogged the hose. Need some modifciation.

Here are some photos


Slags mostly plastics and fiberglass


Concentrates at the wrong side of table, due to bad set up.


And the shaker table, still needs some modfications


I am pretty positive that most of the SMDs and ICs are inside the -200 mesh size part of the boards. Which I will test once I completed my shaker table.

Regards
Kj

 

[patnor1011]

Your material has uneven size and shape.

 

[Barren Realms 007]

You really need to classify your material into different mesh sizes before running it on your shaker table. You will have better results if you do this.

 

[kjavanb123]

I already classified the pulverized materials using a mesh 30 on top of a mesh 200. I ran the mesh 30 ones.
Will use couple more screens.

Regards
Kevin

 

[kjavanb123]

Updates on my project, I used this hammer mill to pulverize the boards as whole to fine powder, after passing the fine powder through mesh 18,30 and 200, the following picture is what retained on top of mesh 200 screen.


It takes some times to make the materials to get into water, so I stirred the water in the mixung bucket prior to adding the fine powder to the water, added some liqd soap to break the surface tension, then ran it through my homemade blue bowl,

This is the metallic part, the gold bonding wires which grinded to fine powder visible by magnifier,


This is fiberglass and plastics or ceramics,


The total weight of fine powder is 9.48kg (20.88lbs). I will report the percentage of non-ferrous metals, ferrous metals, and plastics or fiberglass to total weight.

 

[butcher]

I would do a test on the fine powder to see if you find gold that may have left the blue bowl, in a stannous chloride reaction, incinerate a sample, to remove organics and the HCl boil for tin and to help remove base metals, (copper chloride leach for copper) before trying to put any gold involved in solution for the test.
You could also try an assay on the remaining circuit board material, which may work better and be easier.

You may have most of the heavier metals left in the bowl, but you may also find gold along with many other metals that floated away with all of the fluffy fiber organic and non metal junk.

Incineration of this material is just too dangerous without the proper facility's and safeguards.
without it you may get some of the heavier metal in the blue bowl, but I suspect much will also be lost.

On the scale we work on, and without proper facilities, and with the tools we have to work with, I still believe you will find that cherry picking and selective separation is the best way to get the most from this type of dangerous scrap to work with.

You could try this with some trimmed memory fingers, in a controlled experiment, using your method here of crushing and running through the bowl, and the normally used method of using copper II chloride to get the foils, and see which method works the best, or which you end up with the gold, or loose the gold...

 

[Harold_V]

but you may also find gold along with many other metals that floated away with all of the fluffy fiber organic and non metal junk.

I'd be more than surprised if there wasn't a substantial amount of gold in that material. The idea of separating gold that is so finely divided and thin isn't going to respond well to that kind of mechanical separation. In fact, it could well be that the gold content is higher than that which was recovered as heavier particles.

Harold

 

[kjavanb123]

Harold and 4metals,

Thanks for your comments. I have saved all the fiberglass part to check for value. But when mixing the material with water I stirred while adding small amount of fine powder to make sure it got mixed and most metallics had enough time to settle.
I also used liquid soap in the water while mixing it.
Could that part, meaning making a slurry, cut some losses in the following processes?

A 20lbs sample will be send to Mt Baker mining equipment and action mining for further testing with their shaker table to see the result.

Regards
Kevin

 

[nickvc]

Kevin I fear the guys are right, the values will be so fine that most will float with the fibreglass.
It would take time and enough space within the solution for the values to fall through your wash liquid and if agitated it will cause the values to yet again float.
I applause your attempt and hope you can find a way to separate the values from the dross but I doubt this is it but perhaps the one advantage maybe that the powder can be assayed accurately to give you its true value with proper sampling and the concentrate will at least be easier to treat to recover and refine the values.

 

[kjavanb123]

Nickvc,

Thanks for your support. I have ran a test on a 20lb sample which was crushed and pulverized, and ran it through bowl concnetraor. I have saved all tailing and concentrates.
Processing ICs using Patnor101 also deals with ashes and adding liquid soap prevents fine gold from floating to surface, I also use a long bucket with 1/4 filled with fine powder and 2/3 filled with water, then I open the valve at the bottom of bucket so slury gets dropped to the bowl.
How about if I seieve the fine powder at 325 mesh to let majority of fine gold to separate then run that through bowl?

My intiail plan is to cyanide leach boards to remove gold plated, cement with zinc, then rinse in peroxide, then pulverize, magnet separation, and at the end stage shaker table or blue bowl to separate the metallics.

Keep you posted about my progrss.

Regrds,
Kevin

 

[nickvc]

Kevin in my opinion if your cyanide stripping all the visible gold then just assay or identify the components with values remove them and process those or sell them on.
Extracting all the values without incinerating the boards and then melting is going to be near impossible but don't give up...there may be a way it may well be a simple twist on an already known process but I can't see it.