CFD Models in the Development of Electrical Waste Recycling Technologies

Abstract

Nowadays electrical waste (EW) recycling became a practical way to provide raw material for new devices. Computer parts such as memory, motherboard or other part contains large amount of metals of which the recovery of precious metals and copper represents the highest economical potential. With a proper chemical treatment these metals can be efficiently extracted and separated from the actual waste. For this task a specially designed leaching reactor, equipped with a perforated rotating drum, was used.
This work is aimed at investigating if Computational Fluid Dynamics CFD tools can be efficiently applied to model the chemical reactor used to dissolve the metals from the EW. A hybrid CFD compartmental approach was developed to facilitate the chemical reactions in the leaching reactor. The CFD models were used to model the hydrodynamics, and a compartmental model based on the CFD model was used for modelling the reactions. Based on the velocity field the chemical reactions can be implemented, and the developed simulator can be used to enhance the performance of the existing reactor system. For the modelling studies COMSOL Multiphysics was be used as CFD software. Optimized construction and operating parameters of the leaching reactor, allow us to reduce the energy consumption and the environmental impact.