Smart Determination of Gold Content in PCBs ofWaste Mobile Phones by Coupling of XRF and AAS Techniques

Quantitative determination of most economic valuable metals in waste is the first fundamental operation of evaluating the feasibility of recycling processes. Field-portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometers (FPXRFs) represent a more practical, efficient, and economic tool in determining the elemental composition of samples with respect to conventional analytical techniques, such as atomic absorption spectrometry (AAS) and inductively coupled plasma emission spectrometry (ICP). In this paper, quick and smart determination of gold content in printed circuit boards (PCBs) of waste mobile phones was studied. The aim of the research was to combine the practicality of FPXRFs with the reliability of quantitative spectrometry analysis and evaluate the error between the two techniques....