An experimental approach exploiting high-voltage fragmentation as a selective comminution technology for the recovery of key metals

The recycling of common-use waste has been of paramount importance for several years, leading to different directives as the WEEE 2012/19/EU, which sets optimistic thresholds for recovery as high as 85%, or the ELV directive with a recovery rate of 95% for EoL vehicles. Among them, some particularly interesting products, due to the presence of key metals and rare earths, are Printed Circuit Boards, photovoltaic panels, and sparkplugs, which showed relevant continuously increasing waste volumes. Typically, they are treated through mechanical pretreatment, leading to mixed, non-well-liberated flows. This article shows a novel alternative to them, with High-Voltage Fragmentation as a selective comminution technique for the separation of these key metals from non-target materials. The process works on the principle of electrodynamic fragmentation by creating a plasma channel to delaminate the structure of these products at the material phase boundaries, leading to highly liberated fractions.