I‘m looking for ideas on how to dissolve circuit boards without dissolving the metals contained in them. Strong acids tend to dissolve the metals as well as the board. I want to leave the metals untouched, unharmed.
ME TOO :( I'm tired of trying and failing and everything seems pointless and bad and life is so hard and not fare.
I'm tired of being so full of hate. I despise this feeling, but that just makes it worse.
School, trying, and not ever good enough. I'm tired of alot of other stuff but that's what bothers me the most today, kitty cat
The circuit board is a phenolic (phenol formaldehyde) polymer which will decompose to some degree when exposed to strong base, like sodium hydroxide. This decomposition does not mean that the resulting decomposed material will be soluable in an aqueous sodium hydroxide solution. It will be a sludge, somewhat soluble but not really a solution. The metals in the board, along with all solid state devices will have been damaged to a far greater degree. The active ingredient in drain cleaners is sodium hydroxide. Do not go out and try this. The reactivity of sodium hydroxide is so great that all sorts of issues arise, fumes that are unsafe to be around are generated, heat is created, reactive intermediates which are dangerous in and of themselves are produced.
Are you making a PCB or do you want to dissolve the FR4 material and leave just the copper? I am not sure how one might go about creating de-lamination which appears to be what you are asking but I suppose if you have enough heat you might be able to create separation of the laminated material. I would think that even this process would leave you with some of the fiberglass sticking to the copper sheets. Have you tried putting the circuit board into boiling water to see if the layers would be come separated? I am throwing these ideas out because PCB boards have been known to de-laminate during the wave soldering process but this is mostly due to boards that are defective or have been in storage for quite some time. Try boiling, or soaking for a few days and then throw it into the oven to see if rapid drying will cause the layers to come apart. Now etching is a different story and if that is your goal I can tell you where to go, I use Ferric Choride when I am making PCB but there are much better and cleaner methods, probably cheaper too. ^^^Edit^^^ Ok there is another method that is probably to expensive and you probably do not own the proper equipment. Each type of metal has a different melting point, if you had the proper equipment you could run the boards through an oven at different times. Each pass would remove what ever metals melted at the temperature of the oven. It seems rather obvious that you would have to have some sort of shaker so that the melted metals could be shaken off. Expensive and time consuming.
