Chlorination behaviors for green and efficient vanadium recovery from tailing of refining crude titanium tetrachloride

Abstract

The refined tailing, generated from refining of titanium tetrachloride (TiCl4) for vanadium (V) removal, is a hazardous material to environment due to the high content of V. Aiming at effective and selective extraction of V from the refined tailing, a fluidized chlorination process was proposed in present work. The chlorination behaviors of the refined tailing which determine the efficiency and selectivity of V extraction were emphatically investigated. A resultant 96.36% of V and 4.23% of Ti can be synchronously extracted from the tailing at the optimum conditions of 800 °C for 60 min, with the pressure fraction of chlorine [P(Cl2)/P(Cl2 +N2)] = 0.5 and the mass fraction of petroleum coke in raw materials for chlorination at 10 wt%. High purity vanadium oxytrichloride (VOCl3, higher than 99.99 wt%) can be finally obtained via further simple purification of the collected chloride product. Moreover, the chlorination residue containing concentrated TiO2 has the potential to be further utilized for Ti extraction. Thus the process provides a new prospect for effective, clean and comprehensive utilization of the refined tailing, which can solve the hazardous waste recycle and environmental concerns simultaneously.