Abstract
Rare earth elements (REEs), which include lanthanides as yttrium and europium became crucial in the last decade in many sectors like automotive, energy, and defense. They contribute to the increment efficiency and performance of different products. In this paper nanofiber membranes have been successfully applied for the selective recovery of Eu(III) and Y(III) from aqueous solutions. Polyacrylonitrile (PAN) electrospun nanofibers were impregnated with a commercial organic extractant, Cyanex 272, in order to increase their affinity to rare earth metals ions. The coated nanofibers were characterized by SEM, ATR-FTIR, and TGA. Firstly, the adsorption of Eu(III) and Y(III) were evaluated in batch mode. Experimental data showed that the adsorption of Y(III) and Eu(III) corresponds to pseudo-second order model, with Langmuir sorption model being the best fit for both target ions. The results demonstrated that the adsorption capacity was high, showing a maximum capacity of 200 and 400 mg/g for Y(III) and Eu(III), respectively. Additionally, the presence of interfering ions does not show significative effects in the adsorption process. Finally, experiments in continuous mode indicated that the adsorption of the target elements is close to 100%, showing that PAN-272 is a promising material for the recovery of earth metal ions.
Highlights
The growing need for advanced materials and components, the global growth of population and natural resources depletion raises the question of whether there will be material supplies in the future
Rare earth elements (REEs), which include lanthanides as yttrium and europium became crucial in the last decade in many sectors like automotive, energy, and defense
Polyacrylonitrile (PAN) electrospun nanofibers were impregnated with a commercial organic extractant, Cyanex 272, in order to increase their affinity to rare earth metals ions
Summary
The growing need for advanced materials and components, the global growth of population and natural resources depletion raises the question of whether there will be material supplies in the future. The so-called ‘critical raw materials’ (CRM) are crucial to meet today’s societal challenges and needs in many kinds of industries such as metallurgical, ceramics, electronics, and catalysis They can be used in the production of materials like fluorescent lamps, lasers, super-magnets, turbines, thin film solar cells, atomic batteries, LEDs, high performance batteries, and cell phones [1,2,3,4]. The separation of REEs using Cyanex 272 has been widely studied, to our knowledge, there are no reports on the extraction of rare earth metals by nanofiber membrane impregnated with such selective extractants
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