Metals Recovery from Waste of Printed Circuit Boards Processed in Plasmatron Plasma Reactor

This paper presents an investigation of printed circuit boards (PCB) waste processing in plasmatron plasma reactor. A test setup was designed and built allowing research over plasma processing of PCB waste in more than 700 kg/day scale. The process in tests consumed 2 kWh/kg of processed waste. An investigation of the products process, in form of metals and slag, is presented with their elemental analyses. An average recovery of metals in presented experiments is 76%, and waste mass reduction, 45%. The investigated mass balance of the process indicates partial metal oxidation in the plasma process. It is estimated that metals oxidation is responsible for 2–10% of metals recovery reduction, and 10–20% of slag mass increase. Briefly, the chosen process parameters are presented: energy consumption, throughput, process temperatures and air consumption.