What's the process of extracting pure copper from waste cables and wires？

Now pure copper can be extracted from waste cables and wires by wire stripping machine, water type or dry type copper wire recycling machine. Among these ways, the dry type copper wire recycling machine is the most popular way. Because this dry type copper wire recycling machine is completely friendly to the environment and has a high separation rate. Today, we mainly introduce how to use dry type copper wire recycling machine to extract pure copper from waste cables and wires.

Dry type copper wire recycling machine

1.First of all, the waste cables and wires need to be shredded/crushed to small pieces. The shredder is an optional machine. For bigger capacity(500kg/h or higher) or wires with iron, the shredder will be necessary to preprocess the wires to 3-5cm, in order to increase the capacity and lessen the abrasion of crusher blade.

Then the crusher will cut the waste cables and wires to 3-4mm. There is a screen on the bottom of crusher to control the particle size. It is essential before separating. Because the following air separator works mainly based on the different gravity of same big copper and plastic particles.

2.Then the air separator will separate the copper and plastic. As said above, the same size of copper and plastic have different weights. Under the vibrating and air blow, they go to different direction.

3.At the copper exit of air separator, a line vibrating screen will be equipped to screen out the brass plates and bigger particles, to get pure copper.

Workflow chart

4.If your waste cables and wires have iron, the magnetic separators will be necessary. There are two kinds of magnetic separators for option. One type is self-unloading type magnetic separator is usually installed on the belt between shredder and crusher or between crusher and air separator. It mainly removes the 0.1-25kgs ferromagnetic materials automatically. Another type is double-layer magnetic separator, which usually installed at the end of copper exit of air separator and before line vibrating screen. This mainly removes the ferromagnetic materials in small granule or powder.

5.If there are large quantities of thin wires less than 3mm, the electrostatic separator will help to increase the separation effect, more suitable for separating smaller than 4mm materials. It will be installed at the plastic exit of air separator to extract the small quantities of copper from plastic. To feed the material more evenly and increase the separation rate, Doing Group develops a kind of bucket elevator for the electrostatic separator. Thus, the separation rate can get to higher than 99%. There will be almost no copper in plastic and no plastic in copper.

6.During the whole process, there are double dust collector systems to ensure the site clean. The cyclone dust collector will collect most of the big dusts and pulse dust collector will remove the smaller dusts.

The advantages

The above is the complete process of DOING dry type copper wire recycling machine. As you can see, this dry type copper wire recycling machine will not use water, fire or chemicals. The dry type copper wire recycling machine is a fully automatic machine, too. 1 or 2 workers will be enough to operate, saving the labor cost. So if you are interested in this dry type copper wire recycling machine, welcome to learn more details from Doing Group.