UMD Team Develops Novel Method to Recycle 3D Printed Circuit Boards

E-waste—the massive volume of discarded electronics in the form of smartphones, digital screens and other electronic devices—is a global crisis. Less than a quarter of the 62 million tons of e-waste produced annually is successfully recycled.

Part of this glut originates from design engineers that prototype electronic circuit boards used for new products. Modern prototyping tools have allowed for the quick production of these testbed circuit boards, often with little afterthought for addressing their end-of-life impacts.

Researchers from the University of Maryland, University of Notre Dame and Georgia Institute of Technology are now working on a viable solution, developing a fully recyclable printed circuit board that dissolves when immersed in water.

Known as DissolvPCB, this novel fabrication method is low-cost and accessible, and can be created using a standard Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) 3D printer, several of which can be found in makerspace labs on the UMD campus.

How does it work? The circuit board uses a water-soluble synthetic polymer known as PVA as the substrate and a liquid metal alloy known as EGaIn as the conductor material. At the end of its life, the printed circuit board is simply placed into water, where the PVA dissolves and the EGaIn material gathers into a reusable liquid metal bead that can be easily recovered to fabricate another circuit board.

In their initial testing, the multi-institutional team—led by the University of Maryland—found that their method achieved a more than 98% material recovery rate.

The researchers just presented a paper outlining their method at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) in South Korea, where it won a Best Paper award. It was one of only six papers from the more than 900 submitted to receive this recognition. 

DissolvPCB also received Special Recognition for Sustainability in the Demos category at UIST. In addition, the researchers have released an open-source plugin for designing recyclable electronics.

This recovery method for printed circuit boards could be just the first step in rethinking how electronics used for computing are manufactured and recycled, says Zeyu Yan, a fifth-year computer science Ph.D. student at UMD who was lead author of the study.

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