Practical trainings, student assistants and theses

Summary: Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) are an essential part of electronic devices and often contain substantial quantities of valuable and precious metals (20%) along with huge amount of organics (70%). While recycling of these end life electronic or production waste (EEW), copper is obtained as a major metallic component along with precious metals such as gold, silver, palladium, and platinum in the alloy phase. The organics are base and filler materials form PCB such as epoxy resins, fire retardants and fibers. During PCB manufacturing, processing, or disposal, dust generated may contain these valuable metals. Such fine dust (20 - 75 µm) makes recovery of precious metals and separation from organics challenging. Separating and analyzing these precious metals from PCB dust can offer economic benefits and reduce environmental harm. Present thesis work will focus on detailed feed analytics of the fine fractions. Physicochemical and particle based methods for metal identification, extraction, and refining will be designed and developed. The right combination of techniques will depend on the specific metal composition, particle size, and concentration of the precious metals in the dust. This will help in valorize fine dust based hazardous waste using circular economy approach.
In this thesis project, at HIF, HZDR (Department of mineral processing) we will pursue the innovation along following steps:
1. Pre-processing of PCB dust (Splitting and Sieving)
2. Initial Characterization in order to know about the size distribution, elemental assay, present phases using (LD, ICP-AAS, OES, XRF, SEM, CT)
3. Apply analytical separation techniques (gravity separation)
4. Liquid –liquid particle extraction- optimization of the process
5. Froth flotation- e.g. reverse froth flotation- optimization of the process
6. Leaching of concentrated fractions and recovery of Cu and other possible metals
7. Final characterization of recovered fractions (LD, TGA, ICP-AAS, OES, SEM, XRF and CT)
8. Conclude with optimizing the economical process for recovery

• Educational background: Chemcial engineering, Process engineering or related field
• Knowledge of mechanical separation processes, basic laboratory skills, or analytical techniques (such as TGA, ICP, XRF, CT)
• Good English skills
• Ability to work independently

• Duration: 6 months
• Start date: as soon as possible
• Workplace: Freiberg