Researchers at West Virginia University in Morgantown are working to bring discarded electronics back to life, recycle e-waste, and recover minerals from it to make new products vital to national defense. increase.
Courtesy of West Virginia University
Terence Musho, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources, is leading the project, which has funded more than $250,000 from the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DOD) Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. received.
The United States relies on countries such as China to provide raw materials critical to the manufacture of electronic equipment for national defense.
“Reliance on national resources abroad has led the White House to identify severe shortfalls in the semiconductor supply chain,” says Musho.
That scarcity is one reason the Department of Defense is turning to readily available e-waste like old “LEDs and microelectronics used to amplify radio frequencies.”
One key factor that distinguishes Musho’s work with Statler’s Professor Edward Sabolsky from current e-waste recycling systems is “the ability to achieve very high temperatures in a very fast manner.” Musho says.
“This means the Department of Defense can bring this technology to these e-waste disposal points,” Musho says. “Space debris is a high-profile problem, so the idea that this could be used in space is a pretty big idea. Collect junk satellites, recycle waste, bring raw materials back to Earth. Another possible application is: [on] US Navy ships can move this equipment to another port for waste recycling. ”
civilian use
The technology also shows promise beyond national defense.
“Each community could have an e-waste recycler,” says Musho. “Communities can recycle their own e-waste, extract raw materials, and sell those materials to manufacturers.”
Electronics recycling began to emerge in the 1970s, but it was not very popular. Musho said there are only a handful of facilities in the United States that can process electronics, including Logistic Recycling Inc. in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Apt He Electronics in Glenview, Illinois.
“These places generate mountains of e-waste,” he adds.
Electronics recycling facilities process electronic waste by either pyrometallurgy or hydrometallurgy. These processes use high temperatures or hazardous chemicals to extract minerals from electronics, both of which require large amounts of waste to be economical.
Problems like these are the main reason most e-waste ends up in landfills. In an effort to change that, the Department of Defense has focused on recovering seven specific elements from e-waste. The main ones are gallium, indium and tantalum.
Project details
Musho uses computational thermodynamics to simulate the mineral recovery process, and Sabolsky validates the simulations to prove that the process really works.
Musho says he’s confident it will work, especially since Sabolsky’s previous work laid the foundation for this study.
“Ed previously did research on coal fly ash, a waste product from coal-fired power plants, and demonstrated that this process also works for other important elements in fly ash,” says Musho. says. “Now we take that knowledge, improve it, and apply it to e-waste.”
The first phase of the project is a nine-month study demonstrating Musho and Sabolsky’s e-waste recycling process in their lab.
They have since said they plan to refine their approach to “achieving stricter purity standards” for the recovered minerals. We then work on packaging the technology within small modular units that can be easily transported once we begin to consider commercialization.
“There is now a large amount of critical material in landfills for e-waste,” says Musho. “It’s just a matter of determining how best to recover these elements. The technology we’re developing is not only for Pentagon electronics, but also for consumer electronics. We provide solutions.”
