Estudo da viabilidade técnica e econômica da recuperação de cobre através da técnica de lixiviação de placas de circuito impresso em solução de ácido muriático e água oxigenada

Abstract

Currently, there is great concern about the destination of electronic waste. It is known that today Brazil is the fifth country that produces this type of waste the most, but only around 3% of this material is treated. Due to this, this work was born with the intention of improving and making existing methods of treating and recovering printed circuit boards, which is a type of electronic waste, easier through 3 stages. The initial stage of the work focuses in the characterization of the material received, which consists of around 10 kg of previously fractionated printed circuit boards. These plates were subjected to a particle size separation process, where one fraction was burned and the other was dissolved in an acidic medium. Subsequently, samples were used to identify the chemical composition and quantify the metals present, using the analytical techniques of X-ray Fluorescence (XRF) and Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectroscopy (ICP-OES). In the second stage, the metals from the printed circuit boards are recovered through two distinct approaches: one that involves the exclusive treatment of the material through a hydrometallurgical route, and another that uses a burning process, which is partly pyrometallurgical, before hydrometallurgical part, followed by subsequent chemical characterization. Finally, the third stage consists of the electrochemical process to study the feasibility of recovering metals from the samples.