Results

The end-of-life of a printed circuit board (PCB) consists of several recycling processes: e-waste collection, dismantling, sorting, shredding and refining where the valuable metals like Gold, Silver, Copper etc., are finally extracted. At the moment attention is however increasingly brought to critical raw materials (CMRs) other than the high-value precious metals. In the newest iteration of the EU Critical Material Act, the list of materials identified as critical from a supply and strategic viewpoint has grown to 30.

In the NWO Perspectives Project “Circular Circuits”, an academic-led consortium is researching various ways to concentrate materials in waste PCBs based on a combination of selective hydrometallurgy, smart machine vision and micromanipulation (FIGURE 1). We contribute in the so-called sensory sorting where machine vision and neural networks recognize and sort electronic components liberated from a waste PCB. Results so far show that our algorithms can successfully manage a few component classes under real-life conditions (FIGURE 2). We continue our research for more efficiency and better valuation of the waste components. A similar algorithm can be used to value waste PCBs before component liberation (FIGURE 3), something that has a more immediate application.

The RAAK MKB AutoCue project was set up to investigate how to couple a photonic lab-on-a-chip device without active components (light sources and detectors) to a readout device that does contain these activecomponents.

The result is a two-stage system where a first passive step brings the optical input of the chip close enoughfor the second active step to make the final coupling.

To investigate this coupling for many different options, a demonstrator has been developed that cansimulate different designs and test them in practice.