MOSCOW, November 13. Researchers from the Kurnakov Institute of General and Inorganic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences have developed a new method for highly efficient isolation (extraction) of rare earth elements from aqueous media, which, is expected to be promising for isolating these valuable components from waste high-tech materials, the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation reported.
Under the conditions of Western sanctions, the task of providing the Russian economy with key types of mineral raw materials has taken on a strategic nature. The most important priority is import substitution, the creation of technologies and full-cycle production based on our own mineral resource base.
Rare earth metals are in high demand in a large number of industries, including defense. Such metals, for example, are an integral part of modern electronics.
In addition, recently, due to the abandonment of traditional incandescent lamps, the production of fluorescent lamps containing materials based on neodymium, samarium, europium, terbium and other metals has increased. In this regard, considerable attention is paid to the processing of secondary raw materials containing expensive rare earth elements, with the aim of their isolation and further use, as well as the prevention of environmental pollution. For these purposes, so-called bifunctional ionic liquids based on available industrial reagents can be used.
Chemists from the Institute of General Chemistry and Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences synthesized such a liquid of a new composition and studied its properties.
“Our work proposes a new bifunctional ionic liquid based on industrial extractants for the extraction of rare earth elements from weakly acidic nitrate solutions,” noted Arina Kozhevnikova, one of the authors of the work, a junior researcher at the Laboratory of Theoretical Foundations of Chemical Technology of the Institute of General Economy of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The main advantage of the proposed ionic liquid was the simplicity of its synthesis, which can be implemented directly at enterprises processing mineral and technogenic raw materials, and the absence of organophosphorus reagents in its composition, which often not only interfere with the release of target metals, but can also produce toxic phosphorus-containing waste. The new ionic liquid was used to extract yttrium, europium, gadolinium and terbium, which are most often found in phosphors and other modern functional materials, from nitrate solutions, and showed high efficiency. Scientists were able to select process conditions in such a way as to achieve complete extraction of metals in just one stage.
In the future, the authors plan to use the new ionic liquid to extract rare earth elements from solutions of waste luminescent materials. The work was carried out with the support of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation within the framework of the state task of the Institute of General Economy of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
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