Bioleaching of End-of-Life Printed Circuit Boards: Mathematical Modeling and Kinetic Analysis

This work reports a kinetic study of the bioleaching process for Cu extraction from waste printed circuit boards (WPCBs), using iron as an oxidant agent. The kinetic study considered both the Fe2+ oxidation by bacteria metabolism and the chemical reaction between Fe3+ and Cu within WPCBs. The model was composed of a system of three differential equations characterized by three dependent variables and seven parameters. The first equation...