An experimental approach exploiting high-voltage fragmentation as a selective comminution technology for the recovery of key metals
Marco DIANI, Shravan TORVI, Marcello COLLEDANI
Abstract. The recycling of common-use waste has been of paramount importance for several years, leading to different directives as the WEEE 2012/19/EU, which sets optimistic thresholds for recovery as high as 85%, or the ELV directive with a recovery rate of 95% for EoL vehicles. Among them, some particularly interesting products, due to the presence of key metals and rare earths, are Printed Circuit Boards, photovoltaic panels, and sparkplugs, which showed relevant continuously increasing waste volumes. Typically, they are treated through mechanical pretreatment, leading to mixed, non-well-liberated flows. This article shows a novel alternative to them, with High-Voltage Fragmentation as a selective comminution technique for the separation of these key metals from non-target materials. The process works on the principle of electrodynamic fragmentation by creating a plasma channel to delaminate the structure of these products at the material phase boundaries, leading to highly liberated fractions.
Keywords
Circular Economy, Mechanical Separation, Demanufacturing, Recycling, High-Voltage Fragmentation
Published online 9/10/2025, 8 pages
Copyright © 2025 by the author(s)
Published under license by Materials Research Forum LLC., Millersville PA, USA
Citation: Marco DIANI, Shravan TORVI, Marcello COLLEDANI, An experimental approach exploiting high-voltage fragmentation as a selective comminution technology for the recovery of key metals, Materials Research Proceedings, Vol. 57, pp 617-624, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21741/9781644903735-72
The article was published as article 72 of the book Italian Manufacturing Association Conference
Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
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