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I noticed many Indonesian E-waste recyclers use smelting process with cheap clay crucibles, they use this kind of crucibles only one time, then they break it to get metal button for further processing.
I found this video talking about same crucibles producing.
I tried to understand what they exactly use for the crucible recipe by YouTube translator, I noticed that they only use clay from agriculture rices fields (as read by YouTube translator)
Anybody have any idea about what they exactly use to make this kind of crucibles? Can we just smelt E-waste using normal pottery clay?
Here another video I shared before for e-waste smelting using same crucibles.
Clays are a very fine component of aggregates, usually in the silt class of how fine it is. The clay is a product of various Feldspar decomposition. What you look for is the Alumina quantity. Clays will vary in their Alumina content, so every pottery clay is a little different, depending on its source. A good melting crucible will have on the order of 60% Alumina, 35% Silica, 5% other minor components. There are a variety of crucible compositions available, depending on what metals, temperatures, and fluxes are required. There is a paper put out by the US Bureau of Mines, giving various compositions for your specific requirements. Try this link https://wwwosti.gov/servlets/purl4389738 . Crucibles have a set order for drying and firing, and tempering. A little too involved for a quick reply, as books have been written on this subject.
The burners appear to be either diesel, or waste oil ( very cheap to run ) thinned down with diesel or gasoline. Oil has a couple times the BTU content of gasoline, and slightly more than diesel. The fuel is generally put in a pressure rated tank, propelled by the compressed air, then sprayed through an atomizing nozzle. An oil filter is a good idea to filter out nozzle plugging particles.