If you have turned on electronic devices such as radios, televisions, or even old phones, you should have seen the structures inside. Have you noticed those shiny golden parts on the circuit board? Those shiny things are actually gold. Due to its excellent conductivity and the ability to withstand long-term exposure without corrosion or rusting, gold is commonly used on circuit boards. Used circuit boards are not “waste”, 90% of them can be recycled and even have high value. It is similar to calling them “treasures”.
It is understood that in these circuit boards, in addition to containing 30% inert oxides and 30% plastic, there are also 40% metallic substances, and among these metallic substances, there is 0.1% gold content. And how to extract the gold from these discarded circuit boards specifically?
Circuit board gold extraction equipment
At present, most people who extract gold from circuit boards choose “circuit board recycling equipment”, which is a very simple and convenient metal separation device that can easily separate metal substances from non-metal substances in circuit boards, and then extract gold through a series of steps. Let’s take a detailed look at the process below. Firstly, we need to distinguish between waste circuit boards, which are generally divided into two categories for recycling: one is circuit boards with electronic components, which require us to use a dismantling machine to dismantle the electronic components on the circuit board one by one, and then proceed with the next steps on the dismantled electronic components and mother board. The second type is circuit boards without electronic components, which can be directly crushed and recycled, and then the resin, fibers, gold, silver, copper and other substances contained in them can be separated to obtain good metal materials. At this time, we can recycle the metal and sell it at a reasonable price to make a profit.
It can be said that both simple disassembly of the first type and crushing and separation of the second type can sell at a good price, but of course, the highest profit is still the complete extraction of gold. To extract gold, it is essential to understand its applications in circuit boards. Gold is widely used in the manufacturing of circuit boards due to its corrosion resistance, non brittleness, good power connection characteristics, reliability, and strong plasticity. It can not only improve the service life of products, but also significantly reduce the problem of electronic device failures. But we also know that gold is expensive, and manufacturers cannot use gold to make all the components. Instead, they use copper, zinc, and tin to replace a part of gold. Only when key components such as circuit boards, integrated chip CPUs, computer memory modules, heat pipe heat dissipation boards, etc. must use gold, will they choose to use gold, especially for some good electronic devices. The amount of gold used will greatly increase, which means that the better the electronic device, the higher the gold content. For example, some laptop PCBs may contain 0.2 grams of gold, and a small CPU may also contain 0.5 grams of gold. Don’t rush to open your computer to take a look when you hear this, as it’s not too late to open and study it when it’s scrapped. There are gold coatings on the PCB circuit board of mobile phones, computer memory modules, resistors, capacitors and other components, among which the integrated IC of central air conditioning has a high gold content.
How to refine the operation specifically? In general, refining gold involves three steps: first, high-temperature furnace calcination, which is used to remove capacitors, resistors, and some residues from the circuit board through high-temperature calcination; The second is to dissolve it by using some chemical agents, such as sulfuric acid, etc; The third is to continuously raise the temperature to melt the substances inside the furnace, ensuring that the temperature reaches 1500 degrees, because some circuit boards now add many different metal materials inside during production, and each metal material has a different melting point. It is necessary to reach a sufficient temperature to separate these metal substances layer by layer. After completing these three steps, you can almost separate the gold. Once it cools down, you can see a shiny “little gold”. This refining method can not only extract gold, but also separate some other precious metals such as silver, copper, lead, zinc, tin, etc., but the main benefit is still gold.
The classification and identification of recycling is not simple. Each line has its own way. If you want to recycle circuit boards and extract gold, you must learn to distinguish which products contain gold, how much gold they contain, and whether the products are real or fake. Be careful not to be deceived!
