Received Date:2026-01-22 Revised Date:2026-03-17 Accepted Date:2026-04-01
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2026 NO.02
The widespread use and continual upgrading of electronic devices have generated a large amount of electronic solid waste. As devices are upgraded and replaced, the quantity of discarded electronic products has increased year by year. Thermal conversion processes are an important route for valorizing electronic solid waste; however, brominated flame retardants present in such waste can readily transform into pollutants, including dioxins. Accurately predicting the formation of brominated products during thermal conversion is therefore crucial for controlling pollutant emissions. This study focused on the pyrolysis of waste printed circuit boards, a representative type of electronic solid waste. We compiled 653 pyrolysis data points from 76 research articles published since 2000 and applied five common machine learning models—extreme gradient boosting regression (XGBoost), random forest (RF), multilayer perceptron (MLP), Gaussian process regression (GPR), and support vector regression (SVR)—to predict the relative yields of brominated phenols, brominated bisphenol A (Br-BPA), brominated polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (Br-PAHs), hydrogen bromide (HBr), and aliphatic compounds in the pyrolysis products. Key input variables included pyrolysis parameters (e.g., temperature, heating rate, and residence time), feedstock parameters (e.g., elemental composition), and characteristics of inorganic components (e.g., average atomic properties). The hyperparameters were optimized by grid search combined with five-fold cross-validation. The prediction results showed that ensemble models, particularly XGBoost, achieved superior performance in this multi-feature, data-limited setting: for all targets on the test set, the coefficient of determination (
ZHANG Wenming, ZHANG Hongjin, MA Bowen, et al. Brominated Product Distribution Prediction in Waste Printed Circuit Board Pyrolysis[J]. Energy Environmental Protection, 2026, 40(2): 137−147.