Eco-friendly approach for enhancing the floatability of non-metallic components in waste printed circuit boards: Adding gutter oil during dry grinding.

Waste printed circuit boards (WPCBs) are an attractive secondary resource that is challenging to dispose of due to its complexity. Reverse flotation is an effective method to remove non-metallic particles (NMPs) to obtain metals from WPCBs. Nevertheless, the removal of NMPs is usually inadequate in the present flotation practice. Thus, to provide a clean approach to improve the removal efficiency of NMPs, the method of adding gutter oil during dry grinding process was adopted to enhance the hydrophobic sites on the surface of NMPs to improve the floatability. The surface morphology of NMPs was analyzed by SEM, the results show that the rough morphology inhibited the adhesion of bubbles, while water occupied the cracks and pores, making it challenging for collector adsorption, which result in unstable particle-bubble adhesion. The results of FTIR indicate that both NMPs and gutter oil have -CH3, -CH2, -C = O, -C-O functional groups, which promotes the adsorption of gutter oil on the surface of NMPs. The contact angle (CA) results show that the adsorption of gutter oil on the particle surface is conducive to the formation of enhanced CA. Furthermore, the flotation enhancement effect was verified by flotation kinetic experiments. The accumulated floats yield of NMPs conditioned by gutter oil during grinding is increased from 67.05% (NMPs without conditioning) to 95.02%, and the resin recovery is increased by 31.10%. It is demonstrated that dry grinding with gutter oil can strengthen the floatability of NMPs, which provides a potential approach to increase the flotation efficiency of WPCBs.

Recovery of metals in waste printed circuit boards by flotation technology with soap collector prepared by waste oil through saponification.

Recycling metal from waste printed circuit boards (WPCBs) through green flotation technology has been concerned in this paper. For the sake of environmentally friendly of flotation process, a renewable collector was prepared from waste oil by saponification reaction. The collector composition was analyzed by GC-MS, and results show that the main compositions are n-Hexadecanoic acid, oleic acid and octadecanoic acid. XRD and XRF results show that copper is the main valuable element for recovery. Effects of collector dosage and pH on flotation behavior were analyzed. In addition, the feasibility of improving copper recovery by multiple sorting test processes was also verified. Flotation results show that the concentrate yield and metal recovery decreases with the increase of collector dosage, accompanied by the increase of copper grade. When the dosage of collector is 3 kg/t, concentrate with 22% yield, 66% copper grade, and 47% copper recovery is obtained. Furthermore, concentrate yield and metal recovery rate first decrease and then increase with the increase of pH, while copper content first increase and then decrease. The suitable pH of the separation process is neutral environment (pH = 6-8). The study provides an alternative process for the recovery of metals in WPCBs.