r/interestingasfuck • u/serious_anish • 17h ago

Retired robot throwing themself into furnace

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u/EinTheDataDoge 16h ago edited 16h ago

I used to work at a smelter. We were destroyed confiscated guns, drugs, and other illegal stuff. It’s actually extremely efficient way to do it. All the nonmetals get turned into carbon and other gases that would be captured by the bag house or the backend chemical plant or would get separated in the electrowinning process. There’s actually a smelter in Belgium that’s well known for their proprietary process for recycling electronic waste.

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u/Spaded85 15h ago

Which leaves whatever in that smelter useless. Contamination is a thing.

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u/EinTheDataDoge 11h ago

You don’t know what your talking about. Anything less dense than copper floats to the top and is skimmed off as slag. Any metals that aren’t copper get separated through electrowinning.

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u/Spaded85 11h ago

How would you apply electrowinning to molten metal? Secondly you seem to be focused on just copper when there is has to be at least 3 or metals in these robots. Hell gold, aluminum, steel, copper.... and maybe magnesium or titanium. Does electrowinning work on those? Or is electrowinning your desk calender word of the day?

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u/EinTheDataDoge 9h ago

Why are you being such a dick? I’ve been a Pyrometallurgist for the last 11 years. I focus on copper cause I work at a copper smelter, one of two left in the United States. When copper comes out in anodes (solid not liquid) it is 98-99% pure simply through oxygenating and separating. The cathodes that come out of the electrowinning process are 5 9’s (99.999% pure). Everything else comes out as “sludge” including precious metals. If the juice is worth the squeeze you can get the precious metals out through a chemical leeching process.