Scientists use microwave radiation to recover copper from old VVF power cables
Scientists use microwave radiation to recover copper from old VVF power cables
A Japan-Italy research team say they have developed a simple and convenient method for recovering copper wires from PVC cables that involves the use of microwave radiation and avoids the generation or use of toxic chemicals.
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While this might be an improvement over chucking cables onto a bonfire but i think it's unnecessarily high tech. If the cables already need to be cut laterally into specific sections to conform to the wavelength and it uses 200w, then a better design would be to pull the cable over a blade to part the sheath like a hot dog bun. You could do that with a fraction of the power, no emissions from the pyrolysis and simpler more available tools; just some dies/jigs, blades and a motor. It could even be hand cranked. This isn't something that would get research funding though. And I bet there is already a tinkerer doing it somewhere in a shack in Ghana or Pakistan.
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BigStackD on YouTube has an electric cable stripper, which does exactly this, automatically and quickly! It’s really cool.
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hell yeah, then we can just chuck the plastic into the ocean. easy-peasy!
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😆the plastic does not disappear just because you melt it using a microwave. Or have I understood something wrong?
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yes, you missed the important bit. the plastic is carbonized, skipping the processes/stages that would create intermediary, poisonous chemicals.
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And what do you do with this carbonized plastic? Or is it a way to get CO2 out of the air? Or is the example above hust not feasible because it is hard to automate?
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ha, you really need to ask about what to do with pure carbon?
these are just scientists attempting to find a way to extract precious metals without destroying the environment. dont chase the perfect ignoring the good research.
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Wish they had chosen a better title for the article..
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That's very time consuming though. I think the idea is to incentivize recovery for large amounts at once, and quickly. A Glass Reactor size vessel is not very big though...
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Is it time consuming though? You could probably feed it through a cutting jig at tens of centimeters per second or more, and as the other commenter said you have to cut the cables into small pieces anyways for the microwave processing.
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Well, you're assuming this is all flat, unbent wiring. When this stuff is scrapped, it's just a folded mess or ball. They want to just take a big junkyard mess of wiring and melt all the plastic off without any toxic byproducts, then recover the copper.
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They want but they can’t (yet)
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