Bitburger
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What can a chemist do with a old notebook
I know that big companies as Arcelor getting rich because all kinds of expensive non-ferro metals are present in our notebooks. They simply melt these
notebooks and then separate the metals.
Are there people who knows what kind of metals they used and where that they are present?
What chemicals are used in modern HP batteries?
Can you do some interesting things with electronics - like building electrochemical cells or other things?
I don't know a lot about the names (and function) of the components from...what was once my notebook. How do figure out what these names are?
Hence, I'am mainly interesting in non-ferro recovery and chemical related electronics!
[Edited on 26-7-2011 by Bitburger]
[Edited on 26-7-2011 by Bitburger]
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peach
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I thought you meant paper notebooks!
My chemistry teacher still had his original notes from university, decades ago. He' had 30 photocopies of each. He'd hand them out and would then
collect them all back in at the end of the week, after we'd copied them out by hand.
Most modern laptop batteries are lithium based, which is why they are quite expensive.
There is not all that much precious metal in a computer. About the biggest deposits of it are the plating layers on the PCB and the microscopically
thin gold wires inside the chips. The recovery guys can make money from it because they process massive quantities of it. All the electronics that
comes out of companies has to be disposed of as commercial waste, so they have to pay extra to get rid of that. Quite a few bits of electronics are
also classed as hazardous waste, meaning extra charges on it's disposal, which helps offset the recovery costs.
There are useful components inside a laptop, but a side effect of there having to be so many inside such a small space is that they are physically
tiny themselves. This can make soldering them by hand a difficult experience, if not physically impossible (some of the components don't have
terminals or leads on their sides, but arrays of solder balls hidden underneath, which melt and fix the parts in place when they go through the reflow
oven). The parts are often highly integrated as well, meaning they are only really suitable for building equally complex circuits.
One useful component from the laptop would be it's power supply. Those are rated at 10 - 20Vdc and they can dump out some amps, making them a good way
to get from the mains to something more suited to electrochemistry.
As Blogfast pointed out in another thread, you could also recover neodymium from the hard discs magnets.
If you peel the screen apart, you should find polarising sheets in the LCD. These can be used to view stress in other transparent materials by simply
holding them up to a light source and turning them. The stress will appear as rainbows in the material, in the same way that pressing on an LCD screen
causes rainbows to appear near your finger. This principle is used by glass blowers to look for stress left by heating and cooling the glass.
You could also recover the copper.
If the laptop is RoHS compliant, that will mean the solder is silver and tin, rather lead and tin, so there's some possible bounty in there, but not a
lot.
And of coarse, silicon! Although it will have been doped and treated, there are ways to dissolve the functional layers off the top. The silicon
underneath will be mono-crystalline and ultra pure - albeit still doped with some minute quantity of charge / hole carrier.
Typical components you will find inside a computer are;
Capacitors
Inductors
Transformers
Resistors
Diodes (some of them are special diodes, like Schottky and Zener)
Transistors (not just in the chips, but as discrete components)
Massively integrated circuits (the processor)
Charge pump IC's
Linear regulators
LEDs
[Edited on 27-7-2011 by peach]
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Bitburger
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To summarize, I have to read (and try!) Blogfast method for recover the neodymium from HD magnets.
I'am very intresting to see the LCD screen inside. Actually, the destruction of my screen was the reason that my HP easynote (made in 2006!) wasn't
usefull anymore and buying a new screen was 75% the price of a new laptop.
The battery contains indeed a lithium compound, does anyone have an idea which Li compound it contains?
And where can I find the silicon, is it just inside the screen?
Thanks a lot!
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blogfast25
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Quote: Originally posted by Bitburger  | I know that big companies as Arcelor getting rich because all kinds of expensive non-ferro metals are present in our notebooks. They simply melt these
notebooks and then separate the metals.
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I doubt very much that it’s done that way: that would give you a complicated ore-like material with a bit of everything dispersed in it but
everything at low concentration.
Basically what peach said.
A lot of so called e-waste recycling takes place in China in horrific conditions. Many ‘one man companies’ try and recover those few bits of gold
and tin completely manually and for next to nothing (creating huge piles of toxic waste nonetheless)..
Neodymium is an interesting case for the amateur chemist but I doubt if any Western companies are involved in the recovery of this metal from
computers and other e-consumables: you only need to look at eBay prices for neomagnets to realise just how low the price of neodymium now must be (it
turned out not to be so rare after all and China appears to have found huge reserves of rare earths anyway). As long as the virgin material is cheap
as chips the incentive for recycling that material isn’t really there…
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peach
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The lithium should just be as thin films of sheet lithium all spooled up in there.
The screen, the polarisers are stuck to the front and then behind the glass. In the display I took apart, they were glued to the screen and needed
carefully peeling off with a razor blade. Careful because the glass is paper thin and tends to break. If you're is already broken, it may be even
harder to get it off.
The silicon is inside the chips. The biggest bit will likely be inside the CPU.
It's burried underneath the black plastic epoxy. Sometimes, when engineers have wanted to copy a competitors chip, or see what it is, they'll employ
people specifically to open the chip, who do things like boiling it in solvents to dissolve the plastic. A much less sticky method is to smash or
grind through it, or try to split it along it's horizontal axis; which is what I suspect they've done in this photo. We can see the marks left where
the pins used to come in at the side and the wires that connect those to the actual silicon wafer in the centre.
<iframe sandbox width="640" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/FkXwNQwrxZ4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Be advised that some lithium batteries use quite harmful chemicals in their electrolytes; such as hydrogen sulphide, sulphur dioxide and thionyl
chloride. The lithium is also highly reactive towards water and the atmosphere. It'll begin turning dull in seconds as soon as any protective coat on
it is removed.
<iframe sandbox width="640" height="510" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/HJrNCjVS0gk" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
[Edited on 27-7-2011 by peach]
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blogfast25
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Very interesting video, peach…
Apparently the largest Li reserves are now in Bolivia. I can see a certain state wanting to get their grabby fingers on that. With the rise of hybrid
and electrical vehicles it’s basically a gold mine…
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peach
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That's probably why the EPA wanted all that guy's sodium 'waste', after chucking all theirs in the sea in the 40's.
{edit}I can't get enough of How it's Made. I've seen pretty much every single episode. And 'How do they do it'. I believe a big deposit of niobium was
found in Russia not long ago, and tantalum; which is essential for micro electronics (the grain of rice sized capacitors used in computers and mobile
phones are ceramic or tantalum, depending on the value needed). Platinum prices are on the rise, three fold over the last decade or so. Big deposits
of that in Russia. But Russia doesn't seem too happy about the UN, UK and US constantly telling them not to sell weapons to anywhere in the middle
east. Russia made 20 or so unaccounced flights along the coast of the UK last year in TU-160 nuclear bombers. They want to sell things like their
S-300 surface to air missiles to Iran, the way we sell Eurofighters to Saudi Arabia and the US sells F16s to Israel. Which may be a part of the
rising platinum prices; "no weapons sales, fine... the platinum will be three times more". The rise in the price began almost immediately after the
terrorist attack in the US, as the West attacked Afghanistan (somewhere the USSR had previously invaded and then been forced out of by the West).
[Edited on 27-7-2011 by peach]
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Bitburger
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EPA= environmental Protection Agency (or nothing important)
Since I'm mainly a organic chemist I wonder whether there is sufficient Lithium metal in such a laptop battery (11.1V, 4400mAH) that seems quite
powerful but I need a hammer to crush the hard layer of plastic that covers it.
I know that Li is so reactive that it even reacts with the 'inert' nitrogen gas that covers 78% of our air, forming lithium nitride. But it is
intresting when I like to make complex organolithium compounds. So, I store the battery.
But does a LCD screen works like a polaroid, in other words can you filter out specific lightwaves? I don't understand how a material can "measure"
the stress in a material. What is the scientific explanation?
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peach
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Don't smash the battery, pry it open with a screw driver.
There will be a fair bit of lithium in your battery. It will also be more expensive than buying raw lithium, as someone has had to go to all the
trouble of turning it into a film and then into a functional, safe, reliable battery.
The layers on the screen are polarisers.
They are simply a sheet of plastic with lots of very thin lines drawn on them, very close together.
The wave model of light is that it travels as a constantly wobbling, oscillating line. Normal light, from a light bulb or the sun, sprays these
wobbling lines at all kinds of angles and rotations. The thin lines drawn on the sheet make it so that only the wobbling lines that line up with the
gaps will go through, so all the light coming out the other side is wobbling along the same axis. If you hold another sheet of the special plastic up
at the same angle, all the waves will still line up with the gaps and they'll go straight through.
If you turn the second sheet 90 degrees, you will entirely block all the waves of light, so the sheet will appear black.
When a piece of plastic or glass is put between them and bent, the structure of the material causes some of them to start wobbling in different
directions again, so some of them go through the second sheet to your eyes and some of the others don't. Because different wavelengths bend by
different amounts in the stressed areas of the material, it produces a rainbow.
This is the same way LCD screens work.
Light from a lamp behind the screen sprays out in every direction and angle. The polarisers only let through those that are lined up with their
grating. The LCD crystals in between them also line up, so the light can go through. But the crystals can be made to turn by an electronic signal.
When the computer wants to display something different, it changes the voltage on the pixels, so the crystals turn and bend the light as it goes
through the polarisers. Because it no longer lines up with the second polariser once bent, the pixel goes off.
There are polarised sun glasses too, which are supposed to help reduce not only brightness but glare.
More than one person has tried using polarised lenses to see through clothing, and necessarily not for security purposes.
<iframe sandbox width="640" height="510" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/BzHCDknFbDU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
[Edited on 27-7-2011 by peach]
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blogfast25
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| Quote: Originally posted by Bitburger | | Since I'm mainly a organic chemist I wonder whether there is sufficient Lithium metal in such a laptop battery (11.1V, 4400mAH) that seems quite
powerful but I need a hammer to crush the hard layer of plastic that covers it. |
You're gonna have to do better than that: crushing will also crush the thin layers of Li, making them basically irrecoverable. So you need to somehow
cut into the battery, perhaps carefully slicing off the top.
There’s also the risk of shorting the battery, possible causing a fire with some of the organic parts of the electrolyte.
YouTube is probably the best place to find ingenious ways of getting into a Li battery and successfully recover most of the untarnished metal…
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peach
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He's right, if you short it out, that thing is going to get hot, quickly! They'll get hot enough to spray their contents out of the vent, ignite or
burst. Avoid the hammer and other crushing methods.
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Bitburger
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Yes, I forgot the fact that very reactive electrolytes are present in such batteries which causes explosion with lithium.
But in the meantime I have my polarizing sheets from my LCD screen. If I find small mirrors I can make my own spectrometric equipment. (he principle
of UV-VIS) I can also do some physics by calculating the diffraction patterns - the scattering of light when it hits a crystal for example.
I have also a old computer and on the very outstanding site http://oelen.net/science/ there is a description how to make a simple electrolytic cell from it.
But I'm again a little bit smarter now I know the science behind a LCD screen. 
Good to be wrong
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peach
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Cool! Congratulations on the polarisers.
That site's Woelen's you know? He's on this forum, floating around and dropping in.
Using computer power supplies for other purposes is a common thing. Most people stick with bundling the wires into the similar voltage groups.
It is also possible to modify they power supply so it'll output an adjustable voltage.
This guy has an explanation on his site. It's not very hard, it only requires a variable resistor soldering into a specific point on the PCB.
<--------- link
It's a really nice way to get a decent amount of watts at a variable voltage. The supply is also stabilised and already contains shut down pins to
turn it off if things go over or under their limits; you may have to disable one or two of those depending on how many yours has. The chip he's
pointing out in the circuit is actually a frequent component in these supplies, so you may not even have to find a datasheet for a different
controller.
I would recommend you don't try the 50V trick he's doing without some experience with electronics, as driving the supply over it's normal output is
likely to pop the capacitors. They're usually rated for just 5V or so more than the supply actually puts out, and electrolytic capacitors are not
particularly tolerant of going over their voltage limit. Most of the time, people purposefully select the voltage limit as 1/3rd or so more than
they're actually working with.
A power supply like the adjustable one he's made in that link would be about a hundred pounds or more to buy new. If you have a spare computer PSU
lying around, you can recreate it for about 50p's worth of variable resistor.
The PSU works by changing the AC mains into DC, then smoothing it to clean DC. Then a transistor flicks the DC on and off as it goes into a
transformer to change the voltage; since DC alone won't go through a transformer. By flicking it on and off for different lengths of time, the net
voltage on the other side can be changed. A controller chip on the PCB watches both sides and regulates the flicking to keep the voltage on the output
constant. By messing with it's tiny experience of the world (it's feedback pin), it'll think it needs to change the voltage on demand; because it's
now getting 'the wrong' voltage back on the feedback and thinks it needs to boost or reduce the pulse widths. Building a supply like that from scratch
is not easy, it's like a mini power plant. It's also much more efficient and compact than a linear supply.
[Edited on 27-7-2011 by peach]
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sxl168
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Hello,
Long time lurker on these forums, and I just wanted to chime in on some info and experience working with lithium ion batteries.
One of my hobbies is to purchase junk laptop batteries on Ebay, tear them apart, test all cells, and use or re-sell ones that pass all tests. I tear
apart the cells that fail the tests and extract the elements within.
I have torn apart >300 packs so far, both the cylindrical cell types and the foil packs. They all have the same construction inside. 2 electrodes
with a plastic separator between them all rolled up. Your laptop is probably old enough such that the cells aren't the newer NCM types that have a
much reduced Cobalt content. NCM=Nickel, Cobalt, Manganese alloy, the Cobalt content of these types is usually 15% or less of the alloy and isn't
worth the trouble to separate out.
Chances are your cells are like mine and composed entirely of LiCoO2 positive material attached to the aluminum foil. The Copper foil contains the
graphite particles and small amounts of lithium ions and lithium salts (LiPF6). I separate out the foils and process them separately to avoid
unnecessary contamination of the cobalt. Once you have the foils, just fold up the aluminum one and toss it in 10-15% HCl or H2SO4 and bring it to a
temp of 70- 90 C for 1-2 hours with stirring. I find that decanting off the solution and adding a little more acid to the material along with a
little bit of H2O2 will dissolve out a little more cobalt. After that, all you should be left with is black slimy sludge that is mostly carbon black
and polymer binders and can be discarded.
I haven't gotten around yet to the full separation of Aluminum, Cobalt, and Lithium. The solutions are sitting in old 1 gallon jars at the moment. I'm
sure someone here is knowledgeable about that.
Previous posters have warned about metallic lithium, but in my experience, there is no metallic lithium present whatsoever in lithium ion batteries
(The only exception to this is if the battery was abused by being overcharged). Only the store bought lithium primary cells contain metallic lithium
that i know of.
If you do decide to tear the battery apart, the above poster is correct that prying the case open is far safer than smashing it. Smashing it is quite
likely to set off a meltdown of the battery if it still has charge. Do note that opening a cell will release significant amounts of Ethylene
Carbonate, which is rather volatile, odorous, and flammable. It evaporates away rather quickly though once the foils are unrolled. Digging through
MSDS sheets, I couldn't find anything really bad about the stuff other than don't breathe very high concentrations of it.
Safety things I do when disassembling battery packs:
1. Do it outdoors away from anything combustable.
2. Have a bucket of water handy and/or a water hose.
3. Wear protective glasses and gloves.
4. Concrete slab, sandbox, steel can, etc. to contain the pack if something goes awry.
5. Always discharge each cell individually to 2.0 volts or less before proceeding to opening the cells up. This will kick most of the lithium ions
back into the positive electrode as well as pose little to no risk of fire upon opening from possible short circuits. Can do this by attaching a 10-20
ohm 5 Watt or higher resistor across the cell for several hours. Check voltage with a DMM periodically to see when it falls below 2 volts.
I have had 0 incidents following these rules and by being patient and careful opening packs up. Someday I will buy a camcorder and post a Youtube
video of my efforts.
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blogfast25
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| Quote: Originally posted by sxl168 | Previous posters have warned about metallic lithium, but in my experience, there is no metallic lithium present whatsoever in lithium ion batteries
(The only exception to this is if the battery was abused by being overcharged). Only the store bought lithium primary cells contain metallic lithium
that i know of.
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Welcome, lurker!
Yes, that's an important point: 'lithium ion' cells contain no lithium metal, as far as I know. Only fully charged 'lithium batteries' do. And it's a
disappointing amount too...
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