Speaker
Description
Our dependence to electronic tools has made the supply of critical raw metals (CRMs) crucial. Waste printed circuit boards (PCBs) is a promising source of such CRMs, but most of the latter are not recoverable with current industrial recycling practices. One major issue to be solved: the overall composition, and therefore the value, of this urban mine comprising of PCBs. Indeed, this is necessary for stakeholders to build accurate and viable business models to mitigate criticality issues and enable their recycling. To solve this, one need to build a database of the chemical composition of the millions of electronic components (ECs) to be found in such e-wastes. However, full-element analysis of ECs lacks standardization in literature and is often proprietary piece of information from electronic manufacturers.
Hence, our team propose to demonstrate the feasibility of high throughput X-ray fluorescence imaging of waste ECs using synchrotron radiation to populate a reference database of ECs (@BM23, ESRF). This would enable online estimation of the e-waste flux composition, and educated sorted strategies toward sorting bin that are simpler, less variable and more concentrated in targeted CRMs.
Our team also investigate hard x-ray hyperspectral scans as signatures to access a reference components entries in the database. Such scan is acquired online using a transmission setup with an x-ray tube and a pixelated photon counting detectors, and provide a more unique, composition-related signature than an RGB image.
