Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy as enabling key methodology for inverse production of end-of-life electronics

Inverse production strives for a selective dismantling of industrial mass products at their end-of-life (EOL) with the goal to generate highly enriched fractions of valuable materials for subsequent tailored recovery procedures. Since in many cases there is only fragmentary or even no information available about the chemical composition of such EOL-products and their components, there is a need for a fast, inline, multi-element, stand-off analyzing methodology, that can be integrated in an inverse production line. Within the European project ADIR, LIBS was studied to identify valuable materials in electronic components and to allocate this analytical information to the location of the measuring object on the printed circuit boards of the EOL-product. The fused data set of physical - gained via 2D, 3D geometry measurements - and chemical data allows for a selective disassembly and sorting of such electronic components. This paper describes the developed scanning LIBS method, gained results, and the integration of the LIBS measurements in the worldwide first inverse production line to process printed circuit boards of servers and cell phones.