There continues to be an increasing demand for the production of high purity materials including metals, semiconductors and ceramics. One potential way of saving costs is to recycle leftover materials from various industrial processes, such as sawing, grinding, or from by-products of fluid bed and filament reactors, or from production processes that result in very fine powder distribution in a second meltable phase to produce these high purity materials.
However, leftover materials are difficult to handle because of their size that result in a very high surface area which can be easily contaminated, reacted or degraded and very low thermal conductivity even for their compacts, which makes it difficult to heat and melt. For example, some leftover materials are not being adequately reused because of the difficulty of melting them in a clean system and re-generating a high purity material.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds