PCBA to PCBA, a depopulation comparison

Absztrakt

In order to increase metal recovery from discarded printed circuit board assemblies, an additional preprocessing step where its electronic components are presorted before comminution and metallurgy is suggested. The first step in this process is depopulation where the electronic components are removed from the board. However, currently no practical apples to apples comparison has been performed. Therefore, six depopulation methods (both mechanical and thermal) were directly compared on both qualitative and quantitative indicators and evaluated using a multi-criteria analysis. The mechanical methods were faster less energy intensive than the thermal methods but produced lower quality products and had issues with scaling. Overall the best found method was using a pneumatic hammer due to its simplicity and effectiveness.