Gary Hannington
Recycling means saving. Sometimes it saves money, sometimes it saves the planet.
hunnington
Just last week, a team of researchers at the University of Washington announced the development of a new printed circuit board material that works like traditional types and can be dissolved with negligible material loss when recycled in universal solvents like xylene.
How are you doing? The secret is said to be a cutting-edge polymer called Vitrimer. Like any printed circuit board, the board can have added copper plating and components that can be easily stripped from the board during the recycling process. It appears that the solvent reduces the substrate to a jelly-like substance that can be recovered and used. Also.
The researchers published their findings in the scientific journal Nature Sustainability on April 26th. The presentation can be read on the University of California website.
Others are also reading…
Before we explain the process in more detail, let’s take a look at what regular printed circuit boards are made of and why recycling these ubiquitous items hasn’t really worked so far.
Printed circuit boards are used in almost every electronic device in your home. From microwave ovens to smoke detectors, calculators to remote controls where you can actually see the circuit board when changing batteries. Printed circuit boards make wiring electronics much easier than point-to-point wiring like those found on old wooden radios from the early 1930s. Without the circuit board that makes the thousands of side connections to the glass panel that electrically combine row and column addressing, flat screen TVs would not exist. Indeed, a mobile phone has a circuit board that implements the circuitry to make it work, while acting as an antenna for some devices.
Unfortunately, our US. The philosophy of getting rid of things when they get old or broken means that every electronic device in your life right now ends up in a landfill. Case in point: remember what happened to old VCRs and camcorders?
I know I have some electronics on my shelf that I don’t know what to do with, but it’s sad to see working electronics just thrown away. According to a January 2019 United Nations Environment Program report, the world generates 50 million tons of e-waste annually, of which only about 20% is formally recycled.
When it comes to printed circuit boards, you might think that stripping gold from boards is a lucrative business. Because gold is one of the few metals that does not oxidize at room temperature, it is widely used in circuit board interconnects, with one ton of e-waste containing 100 times more gold than one ton of gold ore. This must be kept in mind as some of the mining mechanisms are already in place in Nevada mines.
The idea of placing traces on a board may seem new, but Charles Ducas actually patented the board idea and used a stencil to apply conductive ink to an insulating surface. It dates back to 1927. Unfortunately, just as his invention was beginning to take off, the stock market crash of 1929 ended not only his age in jazz, but also his hopes of expanding his business. You may have read that back then, most families struggled to put food on the table and had little money to spend on luxuries like radios and phonographs. It took time for World War II and the U.S. military to embrace the concept behind electronic miniaturization for radar, communications, and avionics, but progress was slow.
After the war, two things led to an increase in the use of circuit board electronics. The race to space and the desire for consumer products. Of course, this momentum has grown exponentially since the invention of the first transistor in 1947. Soon, the Regency 4, the first commercial transistor radio made with a circuit board holding four transistors, opened the floodgates, followed by expansion a decade later. 10 years to get to where we are today. But what happens to the old stuff you put aside? VCRs, electronic flash cameras, wireless kitchen phones, 386s, 486s, and Pentium computers, sadly buried under layers of electronics.
Most circuit boards utilize layers of thin fiberglass sheets bonded with epoxy resin, so the plastic cannot be easily separated from the glass, creating recycling issues. In regions and countries with limited regulations, boards may simply be burned in toxic piles to extract valuable metals, a process that is probably not good for the environment.
Researchers at the University of Washington suggest that their fusible circuit boards will find great use there. According to their research paper, vitrimer polymer is a jelly-like material that can be rolled to form high-quality circuit board materials. They say vitrimer is a type of polymer discovered in 2015 that can rearrange its molecules to form new bonds, making it “repairable” (for example, able to straighten a bent circuit board) and highly It also has great recyclability.
Printed circuit boards “represent a significant portion of the mass and volume of e-waste,” said co-senior author Wickram Allen University Assistant Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “It’s great in that it’s fire-resistant and chemical-resistant, so it’s very sturdy. But it also makes it basically impossible to recycle. We created a new material formulation with electrical properties comparable to . [circuit boards] It also requires a process of repeated recycling. ”
The research team tested the strength and electrical properties of vPCB and found that it performed as well as the most common material, FR-4.