Pyrolyzing chips

[rickbb]

MS now has a downloadable program that will make an up to date and bootable CD with the latest AV/maleware scanning and removing program.

You run the program on a seperate PC, it downloads the latest deffs and burns a bootable CDR/DVD-R. You use that to boot the infected PC and it runs and cleans any hard drive in the system.

 

[924T]

chlaurite,

I've searched 3 times today for noidea's post about pyrolizing with a steel can with
a hole in the bottom------I've completely struck out.

Do you have a ling, or know of the correct search term to find that post?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Mike

 

[chlaurite]

I've searched 3 times today for noidea's post about pyrolizing with a steel can with
a hole in the bottom------I've completely struck out.

Hmm... Took me a while to find too:
http://goldrefiningforum.com/~goldrefi/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=16473&p=166282

A bit more complex than I remembered it (not sure why I remembered it as a can-with-a-hole in it), but you can see the basic design in his schematic near the bottom of the page.

 

[bswartzwelder]

One thing Deano has said, is to put a little water (maybe a couple of tablespoons, (don't really remember how much) of water into the bottom of your semi sealed can before you start to pyrolyze. There have been documented explosions from the oxygen in the air combining with the gasses produced by the pyrolysis process. Anyhow, as the water flashes to steam, it increases in volume quite significantly. Again, I can't remember the ratio because the last course I had in nuclear engineering or thermodynamics was in 1986. As the water flashes to steam, the steam fills the container and drives out the air (and oxygen) from inside the container. No oxygen, no explosion, and this happens at a temperature right around 212 degrees F. Once all the water has flashed to steam, the inside temperature will start to climb. I don't know if regulating the temperature is critical, but I suspect it is not as long as the gold doesn't vaporize or the steel making up your pyrolyzer doesn't melt.

I called my local steel supplier yesterday and he gave me his fax number for ordering steel. I dialed it up and got some kind of verbal message saying the line was not usable because of problems on the phone company side. Called him back and learned the phone company building where a lot of the switching takes place took a direct lightning hit. Mother nature 1, phone company 0. He did have his phone service and email service restored, so I retyped my list and emailed it to him. He said his fax had been down for 3 or 4 days as they try to make repairs. Would have liked seeing that hit (from a safe distance, of course). I'm also going to order 3 casters today so I'll be able to move this thing around easily.

 

[g_axelsson]

I did a simple version of that system, two steel cans, one larger than the other. The smaller one stuffed with IC:s and the bigger one turned upside down used as a lid. The gases are forced down to the lower edge and passed through the fire on it's way up again.

It works perfectly for pyrolyzing and I got very little smoke from it when the cans were covered by the fire.
After all gases were gone I just removed the top, but the deep can didn't get a lot of oxygen. After a long time in the fire and even trying to blow air down into the can I still got a lot of carbon in the IC:s. I think that the next time I will transfer the material to a shallow stainless pan for the final incineration.

I had an old stainless coffee thermos that I cut in half, the bottom part became my cans. A plus is that the smaller one is all smooth so there are no place where gold can be stuck.

There are a lot of things that can be improved in this system, a sieve for example, for easily shaking off the ash while incinerating. The ash hinders the oxygen to reach the parts still heavy in carbon.

Göran

 

[924T]

Chlaurite,

Thanks for going to the time and trouble to ferret out that link for me!

I had seen NoIdea's post quite a while ago, and thought his solution was quite ingenious.

Now that I've seen it again, I've got some thinking to do, because g_axelsson's 2 cans approach would
be easier for me to put together.

Cheers,

Mike

 

[924T]

g_axelsson,

I'm leaning towards experimenting with your 2-can approach to pyrolizing, for 2 reasons: I'm not very mechanically
inclined, so it would be quicker and easier for me to work with the cans than to try to duplicate NoIdea's tank with
a tube running out of it,

and, if it blows up from explosive PVC gasses, I think the odds are that the top can would go vertical, and there wouldn't be any shrapnel, which is a plus.

The last time we were communicating, you were telling me about stepping out of your car and sinking up to your waist
in snow, if I remember correctly (that was right before I was dragged away from forum activity by some family issues
for 4 months).

So, to catch back up a bit, all I can tell you about snow that deep is: that's more snow than I think I could handle.
Here, in northern Illinois, if we get a 16" snowfall, it literally shuts the town down for a day or so. By contrast, even
farther north, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, they've got the appropriately heavy-duty equipment to deal with really
deep snow, and handle it with aplomb.

Up-to-your-waist is a lot of snow!

Cheers,

Mike

 

[bswartzwelder]

The double can idea seems like a good one. Always someone on the forum thinking "out of the box". Goran, I might have missed it, but what are you using to fire your pyrolyzer? I not only have a lot of black chips from all different types of circuit boards, but about a gallon of the green fiber CPU chips. I remember someone posting how they did the green chips, but do not remember the specifics. Look out search bar (HUGE SMILE)!

I moved from SW Pennsylvania to Southern Maryland in 1986. We seldom get snow anymore and usually it melts within a couple of days. However, there are a lot of people living here who have never driven on snow. They are such poor drivers, they can barely manage a wet road. If the weather report says we can expect snow, schools announce they will close down the night before. MANY times, the kids have had a day off when not a single snowflake hit the ground. We have even had several rather deep (18 inch) snowfalls which shut things down for almost a week. I live in a development and share a common driveway with 4 or 5 other families. When I worked for a major airline, it was imperative that I gave it my best shot to get to work, so I bought a snow thrower. All my neighbors are much younger and in better health than I am, but since I purchased the equipment, they all feel it is my obligation to dig them out. Now that I'm retired and have had both knees replaced, they may be in for a shock. I no longer have a NEED to get out.

Bert

P.S. You guys can have ALL the snow.

 

[g_axelsson]

No snow here today! +25 C and a wonderful summers day, only drawback is that my filters and solutions is drying up all the time. 8)

For heating my can incinerator I just made a fire by stacking some wood I got from some pallets my boss wanted to get rid off. I packed it around the can inside an iron bucket (aproximately 5 liter) and set it on fire. There were no explosion, just a little bit of black smoke when the fire died down a bit. Some more planks took care of that. I also used a hot air gun to blow air into the fire, with the added air at 500 C it really burned fast... :twisted:

It's still a bit rough, but I have done it twice now. I'm going to make an inset in coarse stainless wire mesh so I can remove the ash during the incineration but keep any chips that still hangs together. The IC:s that is already incinerated is easily crushed in smaller pieces by shaking the can. It actually looked like I managed to burn away the base metal in the legs of some IC:s.

I haven't processed that material yet but as this is my first day of vacation it is close now... 8)

Göran

 

[freechemist]

Rickbb writes:

MS now has a downloadable program that will make an up to date and bootable CD with the latest AV/maleware scanning and removing program.

What about the latest AV/femaleware scanning and removing program?

 

[rickbb]

Rickbb writes:

MS now has a downloadable program that will make an up to date and bootable CD with the latest AV/maleware scanning and removing program.

What about the latest AV/femaleware scanning and removing program?

:lol: I'm keeping that one a secret until the patent comes through. :lol:

 

[bswartzwelder]

Just one letter in a misspelled word and you guy jump all over it. Gotta love it.

 

[patnor1011]

I talked about that in my thread. You need to use shallow containers to get IC properly incinerated. I use totally inexpensive containers - iron casing from CD/DVD ROM. They are good to fire several times but I have steady supply of them.
Legs often end up "burned off" or lets say disappear but you will find them later on at washing stage in form of small metallic balls.
While I feel partially responsible to using word "pyrolysing" we should really stop using it. None of us is able to pyrolyze his material.
What we do is - incinerating. :mrgreen:

 

[bswartzwelder]

Patnor,

I have to respectfully disagree with you. When chips are put into a closed or semi-closed system (where oxygen cannot enter) and are heated until they no longer give off toxic fumes, I believe that is the process of pyrolyzing. Inverting one can over a second can with chips in it, and placing that on a fire, should also be considered pyrolyzing since there is no real supply of oxygen. The author(s) of that email said the lower edge of the outer can is completely below the flames. Once pyrolyzed, if the chips are once again heated hot enough in the presence of oxygen, they turn into the grayish/white ash and are considered incinerated. Perhaps my understanding of the definitions is not correct.

 

[patnor1011]

We did have discussion about this way back.
Pyrolysis is not only about lack of oxygen. Pressure, temperature control and final output all this define pyrolysis.
What we want to achieve here is simply mass reduction, we turn IC in ash. You do not eliminate oxygen by simply covering one container by another.
I must agree that pyrolysis sound cool and term is somehow sticky but at the end of the day what we do is just what it is - incineration.

From EPA definition of pyrolysis:
" For a process to be recognized as pyrolysis by the U.S. EPA, there can be no visible flame within the pyrolysis chamber. In essence, a pyrolysis chamber must be a sealed chamber heated by an external source that transfers heat into the chamber by meticulously controlled conduction and convection. Organic materials decompose gently over time. "

 

[solar_plasma]

Both of you are right.



There is a definated purposely managed process called pyrolysis. And pyrolytic decomposations will almost always occur when you burn organics, since you can't provide an optimum of oxigen, except your system is purposely built to do so.

Incinerate chips and there will always be some, which are still black, but can easily be crushed to powder, - there the pyrolytic decomposation predominated.

When a house is burning, it takes about 10-17 minutes of pyrolysis to get the temperature and the gasses for the roll-over, which will be the start of incineration of that house. It is minute number 14, we try to extinguish the incipient fire, which mostly can be done with under 60 litres and no water caused damages.

 

[g_axelsson]

Partly I agree with you patnor, whenever I see someone mention pyrolyzing in the wrong way I correct them, but that is always when it is mentioned for the whole process. The end goal is to incinerate the material.

But as so many topics and methods on the forum, it starts out as a simple idea, then people does a lot of trials, new ideas appears and finally we got a process that works better and is easier to manage for the home refiner.

Ideally I would have access to an incinerator with an afterburner that keeps the gases at an elevated temperature with excess of oxygen. (plans and discussions about this option exists on the forum) But that is too big to be practical for the small amounts of IC:s I process.
For me I found out that to keep down the smoke I could just bury a pair of cans inside a fire and most of the gases released are burned inside the fire. This step is by all definitions pyrolyzation. The IC:s comes out black and charred, tin on the legs is still shiny. The next step is to incinerate the charred IC:s to get that fine ashy state that is easily processed. This I can do in an open vessel as there are no more smoke given off from the material. (I have to work some more on this part to get it more effective.)

So to me I'm doing it in a two step process, pyrolyzation drives off the toxic gases in a controlled way, incineration with added air turns the charred components into ash, metal oxides, a silicon die and precious metals.

Patnor, Any chance that the metallic balls you find is the remainders of palladium and silver brazes used to attach the die to the lead frame or solder? You shouldn't reach temperatures high enough to melt copper or iron so any lost legs should either be alloyed with solder or turned into oxides.

Göran

(edit: speeling mistake)

 

[patnor1011]

They would be remnants of legs and solder. Only metal outside resin, exposed to fire. Whatever is inside close to die is still there. From time to time I encounter Intel IC which do have considerable amount of tin inside resin, I observed it several times to spill out from chip. But as I said that small balls are mostly and bits of legs from thin legs variety.
I try to remove legs as I am harvesting IC from boards by cutting them but sometimes when I buy some IC or process for somebody they usually do come with legs and they sometimes (thin ones) end up as small spheres.

 

[maynman1751]

This I can do in an open wessel (actually spelled weasel) as there are no more smoke given off from the material.

How do you open your weasel?
Sorry! Couldn,t help myself. :lol:

 

[Geo]

this discussion is redundant. there is a clear distinction between pyrolisis and incinerating. pyrolizing is literally baking the oils out without flame touching the item. if you heat an item until all thats left is carbon, that can be considered pyrolizing. incineration is using a direct flame in the presence of oxygen to convert carbon to carbon dioxide. if you are left with carbon, its pyrolizing. if you have no carbon left, its incineration.