A critical review on solvent extraction of rare earths from aqueous solutions

By F. Xie, Ting’an Zhang, D. Dreisinger, F. Doyle. 2014

1,269 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Rare earth elements have unique physicochemical properties that make them essential elements in many high-tech components. Bastnesite (La, Ce)FCO3, monazite, (Ce, La, Y, Th)PO4, and xenotime, YPO4, are the main commercial sources of rare earths. Rare earth minerals are usually beneficiated by flotation or gravity or magnetic processes to produce concentrates that are subsequently leached with aqueous inorganic acids, such as HCl, H2SO4, or HNO3. After filtration or counter current decantation (CCD), solvent extraction is usually used to separate individual rare earths or produce mixed rare earth solutions or compounds. Rare earth producers follow similar principles and schemes when selecting specific solvent extraction routes. The use of cation exchangers, solvation extractants, and anion exchangers, for separating rare earths has been extensively studied. The choice of extractants and aqueous solutions is influenced by both cost considerations and requirements of technical performance. Commercially, D2EHPA, HEHEHP, Versatic 10, TBP, and Aliquat 336 have been widely used in rare earth solvent extraction processes. Up to hundreds of stages of mixers and settlers may be assembled together to achieve the necessary separations. This paper reviews the chemistry of different solvent extractants and typical configurations for rare earth separations.

Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Inorganic Chemistry, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/01079c6c8c1867e19031e74d23090620850c95fe

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In Mechanical Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

• Separation of uranium and thorium from rare earths for rare earth production – A review (2015, methodology): “Among a large number of rare earth minerals, only three are mainly used for rare earth production, namely bastnasite with the composition of (RE)(CO3)F, monazite of (RE)PO4 and xenotime of YPO4 (Kanazawa and Kamitani, 2005; Jordens et al., 2013; Xie et al., 2014).”
• The Rare Earth Elements: Demand, Global Resources, and Challenges for Resourcing Future Generations (2018, background): “2013); and because of the additional steps required to separate out each of the REE (Xie et al. 2014; Machacek and Fold 2014).”
• Recycling of NdFeB Magnets Using Sulfation, Selective Roasting, and Water Leaching (2015, background): “This is most probably because they can be easily adjusted to REM ore-processing industry where hydrometallurgical flow sheets are dominant [19].”