Defense department funds WVU e-scrap recycling project

Researchers at West Virginia University, Morgantown, are working to resurrect discarded electronics, recycle electronic scrap and recover minerals from these devices to make new products critical for national defense.

Courtesy of West Virginia University

Terence Musho, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources, is leading the project, which received more than $250,000 from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).

The U.S. depends on countries like China to provide raw materials that are essential to manufacturing electronics for its national defense.

“Reliance on foreign national resources has led to the White House identifying a critical shortage in the semiconductor supply chain,” Musho says.

That shortage is one reason the DOD is eyeing readily available electronic scrap, like old “LEDs and microelectronic circuits used for amplifying radio frequencies, which contain critical supply chain materials,” he explains.

One key factor setting apart the research Musho is conducting with Statler Professor Edward Sabolsky from current systems for electronics recycling is the “ability to achieve very high temperatures in a very rapid manner,” which should allow their technology to be modular and portable, Musho says.

“That means the DOD can transport this technology around to the point of disposal of these e-waste materials,” Musho says. “Space debris is an issue that’s gaining attention, so one far-out idea is that this potentially could be used in space. You could collect junk satellites, recycle the waste and bring the raw materials back to earth. Another possible application would be [on] U.S. Navy ships, which could move this equipment around to different ports for waste recycling.”

Civilian applications

The technology also has promise beyond the sphere of national defense.

“You could have a point-of-disposal e-waste recycler in each community,” Musho says. “Communities could recycle their own e-waste, get the raw materials out and sell those materials back to manufacturers.”

The precious and rare-earth metals used in electronics often are recovered using pyrometallurgy or hydrometallurgy. Those processes use either high temperatures or hazardous chemicals to extract minerals from electronics and both require large quantities of input material to be economical.

Therefore, the DOD has focused on recovering seven specific elements from e-scrap, chief among them gallium, indium and tantalum.

Project details

Musho will use computational thermodynamics to simulate the mineral recovery process, and Sabolsky will validate the simulations to prove the process works in practice.

Musho says he is confident that it will work, especially because Sabolsky’s previous research laid the groundwork for this study.

“Ed did a previous study on coal fly ash, a waste product of coal-fired power plants, and he demonstrated that this process works for other critical elements present in fly ash,” Musho says. “Now, we’ll take that knowledge, improve upon it and apply it to e-waste.”

The project’s first phase is a nine-month study demonstrating Musho and Sabolsky’s e-scrap recycling process in the lab.

After that, they say they plan to refine the approach to “hit tighter purity standards” for the recovered minerals. They also will scale up to process greater quantities of material and work on packaging the technology within a small, modular unit that’s easily transported as they begin to consider commercialization.

“We have an abundance of critical materials currently sitting in e-waste in our landfills,” Musho says. “It’s just a matter of determining the best method to recover these elements. The technology we’re developing provides a supply chain solution not only for DOD electronics but also consumer electronics.”