TY - JOUR A1 - Wienold, Julia A1 - Recknagel, Sebastian A1 - Scharf, Holger A1 - Hoppe, Marion A1 - Michaelis, Matthias T1 - Elemental analysis of printed circuit boards considering the ROHS regulations N2 - The EU RoHS Directive (2002/95/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council) bans the placing of new electrical and electronic equipment containing more than agreed levels of lead, cadmium, mercury, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyl (PBB) and polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) flame retardants on the EU market. It necessitates methods for the evaluation of RoHS compliance of assembled electronic equipment. In this study mounted printed circuit boards from personal computers were analyzed on their content of the three elements Cd, Pb and Hg which were limited by the EU RoHS directive. Main focus of the investigations was the influence of sample pre-treatment on the precision and reproducibility of the results. The sample preparation steps used were based on the guidelines given in EN 62321. Five different types of dissolution procedures were tested on different subsequent steps of sample treatment like cutting and milling. Elemental analysis was carried out using ICP–OES, XRF and CV–AFS (Hg). The results obtained showed that for decision-making with respect to RoHS compliance a size reduction of the material to be analyzed to particles ≤1.5 mm can already be sufficient. However, to ensure analytical results with relative standard deviations of less than 20%, as recommended by the EN 62321, a much larger effort for sample processing towards smaller particle sizes might be required which strongly depends on the mass fraction of the element under investigation. KW - RoHS KW - Printed circuit boards KW - Electrotechnical products KW - Elemental composition PY - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wasman.2010.10.002 SN - 0956-053X VL - 31 IS - 3 SP - 530 EP - 535 PB - Elsevier Ltd. CY - New York, NY AN - OPUS4-23986 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -