Journal of the Korean Society of Mineral and Energy Resources Engineers ISSN:2288-0291(Print) 2288-2790(Online) 한국자원공학회지

Large amounts of obsolete printed circuit bords(PCBs) containing precious metals have been generated. In the study a smelting reduction process for recovering the precious metals from the obsolete PCBs without using additional collector metals was investigated thermodynamically. The distinction of that is to use copper, tin, and iron contained in the obsolete PCBs as collector metals of the precious metals contained in them. Advantages of the process suggested are simple and economic compared with the conventional processes which could recover the precious metals from the obsolete PCBs using additional collector metals such as copper, nickel, lead, and iron. In each experiment the precious metals of Au and Pd could be recovered up to 93.4 % in Cu-Sn alloy phase. The product Cu-Sn alloy phase contained up to 0.20 wt% for Au and 0.05 wt% for Pd.