Anwendungen und Durchsätze

The shock wave technology enables a highly selective separation of electrical or electronic devices at their mechanical weak points, thus enabling selective disassembly into individual components. Disassembling complex assemblies creates new recycling options for the separated materials and detached electronic parts.

The low-contamination shock wave fragmentation process is suitable for processes with high purity requirements. Due to the use of acoustic shock waves and the low level of contact compared to conventional fragmentation methods, metal contamination is kept to a minimum (<10 ppm) during the treatment process.

Shock wave technology can be used for a selective treatment of different metallurgical slags. Separating and concentrating the valuable materials from multi-phase systems like metal slags allows an easier post-processing of these materials and for a better economic and ecological recycling.

By generating high-voltage discharges under water, the fragmenting effect can be specifically directed to hit the material interfaces and focus on the transitions between the mineralogical phases of the slag.

A highly promising area of application of the shock wave process is the recycling of composites, such as solar panels and carbon-fibre-reinforced plastics.In addition to the separation of the materials into their pure individual components, ImpulsTec’s selective fragmentation technology offers even more efficient possibilities of recycling, namely the “functional recycling”. The latter indicates a shift from a pure element/material driven recycling towards a removal of intact composites and complete substructures that are reused in the original application or production process.

The shock wave fragmentation process marketed by ImpulsTec can also be used to treat devices containing hazardous industrial materials into their individual components, so that the valuable substances can be separated from the hazardous parts and recovered. This suggests a variety of possible applications of shock wave technology to improve the efficiency of existing processes or develop entirely new recycling approaches. Since the process is conducted within a fluid fragmentation medium, Li-ion battery cells for example can be safely dismantled, which makes it a functional recycling of the recovered battery materials as well as material based recycling of the components themselves possible. The shock wave process can also be used to carefully dismantle assemblies containing hazardous substances so that the hazardous and non-hazardous substances can subsequently be processed separately.

Because of the specific fragmentation mechanism, the shock-wave treatment, which induces fractures at the interfaces between different materials, the shock wave process is particularly suitable for processing mining products, and can also be used to break down rocks, minerals, and slags containing valuable materials. The specific separation mechanism of the shock wave technology is especially effective for processing minerals, since the material fractures tend to arise at the interfaces between materials with different acoustic properties. The fragmentation process is specific to each crystallographic (impurity) phase, which allows various microstructures to be efficiently broken down.