International Expert Team - Ion Beam Research

I'm afraid I've already got enough to do, so I'm not offering to join the team, but one idea I've had for many years is to ionize garbage (break it up into individual atoms minus a few electrons), and send the resulting stream through a mass spctrometer, collecting the different elements in different containers. I assume it would take a huge amount of energy, but it could recover a lot of good stuff, and keep the bad stuff from contaminating...

Dick

Yes, this technology was developed and used in Brazil for separating Aluminum from paper attached to it. They used plasma to make the paper isolated without a trace of carbon in aluminum.

Hi dkwarner,

melting will require a considerable amount of energy,

evaporation is much higher in energy than melting and

ionisation is much higher than evaporation,

so in total you will end up with a pure energy consumer.

This approach was followed in the early 40ties for uranium enrichment, this machined called Calutron, with magnetically bending the ion beams and having separate small containers for the different masses. Today centrifugal separation is used instead.

Best for separation of materials is either high gradient magnetic field - also suitable for nonmagnetic material - and may be fluid bed decomposition of plastics.

For metals (except aluminum) also bacterial action is used to bring into solution the stuff, this works good for iron, copper, silver and gold and likely for others too.

RHABE

It is not that way in this case. Like microwave oven, you can deposit energy into specific type of material, this plasma technique did not do anything to metal but evaporated the thin paper out of it which was almost hard bound. I looked at their reprocessing plant and idea was to make the environment clean and reprocess everything from coke cans to juice paper carton. It worked well and I have seen the documentary on National Geographic in details.

I think the team deserves a Nobel Prize for their newly developed skill. They have also brought dignity to can collectors and a women was proudly displaying her work. World can learn from Brazil if they have done all this. There was lot more in the documentary.

Technology is in actual use and reprocesses tons of material each hour.

I know this might sound blastphomous but how about making manufacturers use bio-safe packaging methods? Isn't paper renewable? Combining aluminum with various plastics and paper is also a pain in the neck for elderly people to get open any way. It's probably responsible for many injuries as well. From what I've read, there might be a solution for the CO2 problem coming up anyway. Using algae to make bio-diesel, requiring lots of CO2?

While your idea of using paper for packaging is good, one, this topic is in search of scientist and engineers involved in Ion Beam Research.

Ion beam can be from very low flub to very high flux, for different purpose and part of different systems. What I will like to discuss here is, how to create ion beam, how to guide ion beam, how to sense ion beam and ions. Hence, every technology is in this domain that has some base with ions and ion mobility, ion sensing and ion detection.

We will limit the idea to ions in machine and will not like to go deep in ions in biological systems and waste material or chemicals. Idea here is ion production, ion injection, ion formation by charge exchange, acceleration, collider, thermionic emission, vacuum paths, ion traps, ion focus, beam formation and beam shaping, acceleration and direction control, mass based separation of ion, ion detection by charge multiplication, ionization and charge collection, charge to light conversion, ion beam imaging etc.

Hi Shyam,

this is an extremely wide field:

if you include particle accelerators for research in physics one machine will cost above 1000million $ and will require a big team of specialists and technicians,

if you include semiconductor manufacturing - ion implanting and epitaxial growth and ion etching - one machine will be between (0.1 ...10)million$,

if you think about ion-coating equipment and related measurement equipment this is used widely in materials research and production - so what will be new?,

if you think about space related equipment: thrusters and cleaners this may make sense with small scale groups but likely to be developed by others in your country too,

if you think about cleanroom equipment for air cleaning purpose and other air filtering equipment this can give high volume industrial production.

To know the principles is good, to have an aim is necessary.

RHABE

Yes, the idea is to build technology for larger system in parts. This is the way we can finally have something that the group can be proud of and perhaps some money can also be generated for the group and its contributors. I build such systems and I am aware of how one feels about these. If we can think then also it is good and someone else can do the part of investing and testing. How do you think otherwise financially weak people can do big things? I am not rich and yet venture into lot difficult problems, find solution that otherwise need million dollar in investment and years of planning.

If we can have more active group involved then I may be able to donate some electronics to this group that can be used for experimenting. I do not mind sensing this help to any corner of the earth. I have lots of technology, which includes sensitive charge amplifier, high voltage pulsars, radiation detectors and I am in the process of developing many things. I think people who are in the universities should find this very valuable.

You talked about "reprocessing garbage"--correct? I was talking about eliminating it from use.

Topic of discussion is not garbage but Ion Beam.

Some sensors use ions even from garbage or for that matter from any material that can through molecules in air to be converted into ions and sensed by ion beam technique.