Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Cleaning CRT monitors

Crux Australis - 17-3-2012 at 15:36

I'm trying to clean the grey coating - frit - from old CRT monitors, inside and out. I've found that alcohols (particularly methanol) clean it best, but it needs to be scrubbed quite vigourously. I'd really like a method which will dissolve the frit (which contains mostly PbO, but also may contain traces of mercury and cadmium) without scrubbing, so that I can automate the process and reclaim the chemicals for recycling. Anyone have any ideas or experience in this?

watson.fawkes - 18-3-2012 at 07:43

Quote: Originally posted by Crux Australis  
I'm trying to clean the grey coating - frit - from old CRT monitors, inside and out. I've found that alcohols (particularly methanol) clean it best, but it needs to be scrubbed quite vigourously. I'd really like a method which will dissolve the frit (which contains mostly PbO, but also may contain traces of mercury and cadmium) without scrubbing, so that I can automate the process and reclaim the chemicals for recycling. Anyone have any ideas or experience in this?
Idea: Acetic acid should dissolve your mixed PbO. I don't know how fast, though.

Rosco Bodine - 18-3-2012 at 14:30

Nitric acid or aqua regia are candidates, and methane sulfonic acid and sulphamic acids could be useful also.

marko - 19-3-2012 at 01:00

The grey coating is aquadag (pretty much straight graphite).

neptunium - 19-3-2012 at 07:24

the inside also contain some rare earth oxides and aluminum fine powder HCl should take care of that