Recovery of High-purity Coating Resin and Copper Wire from Waste Wire Harness Thin Wire by wet Swelling and Milling Method

Abstract

Wire harnesses (WH), which are mainly used as automotive components, are mostly composed of copper wires covered with polyvinyl chloride (PVC) of a few millimeters in diameter. Although the recycling of automotive parts has become increasingly important in recent years, an effective method for recovering copper wire and PVC from the thin wire of WH has not yet been developed. In our laboratory, we have succeeded in stripping thin wires of about 20 cm in length by the wet swelling and milling method, in which thin wires are swollen by submerging it in an appropriate organic solvent and then stripped by applying an appropriate impact to the wire using a ball mill. In this study, the wet swelling and milling method using a bench-scale reactor was conducted to investigate the stripping behavior of thin wires of 60 to 150 cm in length. As a result, 100% of the copper wire and coating material were successfully stripped at the appropriate amount of treatment and temperature at the time of wire swelling. We expect to increase the amount of treatment and realize stripping without crushing the copper wire and coating material by further examining the optimum conditions.