Production and purification of rare-earth elements (REE) is among the most demanding
separation practices. In general, extracting REE from natural ores requires a large
amount of chemicals and energy. Separating the ores contents is also a complex process
which needs a tremendous amount of organic solvent mixtures to produce high purity
lanthanides. Partial mitigation to this issue lies in urban mining. Recycling old,
discarded electronics is an important step in implementing the circular economy
concept, making electronics more sustainable.
In this work, specific components of old mobile phones were selected for targeted metal
recovery. The main focus was on treating permanent magnets containing Nd, Pr and Dy
as REE. These magnets were dissolved with nitric acid and the dissolutions were used to
measure multicomponent adsorption in different polymeric commercial cationic resins.
The adsorption of lanthanides on Amberlite IR-120 and DOWEX 50WX8 resins is
found to reach equilibrium within 60 minutes. Across all the metals and lanthanides,
Amberlite IR-120 has shown a greater adsorption. Generally, it is observed that more
metals are adsorbed at higher pH values. This behavior seems to be consistent for both
metals and lanthanides. The experimental data of the three lanthanides (Pr+3 , Nd+3 , and
Dy+3) was fitted with diverse models and Sips rendered the best results. Freundlich and
Langmuir models also provide satisfactory correlation coefficients
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:kaust.edu.sa/oai:repository.kaust.edu.sa:10754/691534 |
| Date | 04 1900 |
| Creators | Alkhater, Ali M. |
| Contributors | Grande, Carlos A., Physical Science and Engineering (PSE) Division, Ruiz-Martinez, Javier, Ghaffour, NorEddine |
| Source Sets | King Abdullah University of Science and Technology |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | 2024-05-07, At the time of archiving, the student author of this thesis opted to temporarily restrict access to it. The full text of this thesis will become available to the public after the expiration of the embargo on 2024-05-07. |
| Relation | N/A |
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