Urban mining by flash Joule heating

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dc.citation.articleNumber5794
dc.citation.journalTitleNature Communications
dc.citation.volumeNumber12
dc.contributor.authorDeng, Bing
dc.contributor.authorLuong, Duy Xuan
dc.contributor.authorWang, Zhe
dc.contributor.authorKittrell, Carter
dc.contributor.authorMcHugh, Emily A.
dc.contributor.authorTour, James M.
dc.contributor.orgSmalley-Curl Institute
dc.contributor.orgNanoCarbon Center
dc.contributor.orgWelch Institute for Advanced Materials
dc.date.accessioned2021-10-21T17:53:26Z
dc.date.available2021-10-21T17:53:26Z
dc.date.issued2021
dc.description.abstractPrecious metal recovery from electronic waste, termed urban mining, is important for a circular economy. Present methods for urban mining, mainly smelting and leaching, suffer from lengthy purification processes and negative environmental impacts. Here, a solvent-free and sustainable process by flash Joule heating is disclosed to recover precious metals and remove hazardous heavy metals in electronic waste within one second. The sample temperature ramps to ~3400 K in milliseconds by the ultrafast electrical thermal process. Such a high temperature enables the evaporative separation of precious metals from the supporting matrices, with the recovery yields >80% for Rh, Pd, Ag, and >60% for Au. The heavy metals in electronic waste, some of which are highly toxic including Cr, As, Cd, Hg, and Pb, are also removed, leaving a final waste with minimal metal content, acceptable even for agriculture soil levels. Urban mining by flash Joule heating would be 80× to 500× less energy consumptive than using traditional smelting furnaces for metal-component recovery and more environmentally friendly.
dc.identifier.citationDeng, Bing, Luong, Duy Xuan, Wang, Zhe, et al.. "Urban mining by flash Joule heating." <i>Nature Communications,</i> 12, (2021) Springer Nature: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-26038-9.
dc.identifier.digitals41467-021-26038-9
dc.identifier.doihttps://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-26038-9
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1911/111593
dc.language.isoeng
dc.publisherSpringer Nature
dc.rightsThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.titleUrban mining by flash Joule heating
dc.typeJournal article
dc.type.dcmiText
dc.type.publicationpublisher version
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