Research Progress and Trends in Iron Metal Purification Processes

Abstract

Traditional industrial pure iron can no longer meet the requirements of many core industries, such as aerospace, electronic information, and military industries. Thus, high-purity iron has attracted considerable interest. Pyrometallurgy, hydrometallurgy, and electrometallurgy provide extensive research platforms for purifying and developing novel processes for producing high-purity iron. In this paper, we review latest research advances in high-purity iron purification methods and production processes and summarize the merits of each purification method. Moreover, we propose a production process that ensures the production of high-purity iron while reducing carbon emissions. In this process, iron ore is leached using a hydrometallurgical process, high-purity iron is obtained by electrolysis from clean energy sources, such as photovoltaics and wind power, and the purity of iron is increased to over 5N with a pyrometallurgy process.

Elucidating the Influence of Electrolyte Additives on Iron Electroplating Performance

“…Similarly, we believe that the findings and methodology established in this work can be extensible and help advance technologies that rely on iron or metal electrodeposition. Concrete examples of this are the high-purity iron layers required in the aerospace industry for safety purposes [99], electromagnetic properties such as magnetic shielding and memory in electronics and spintronics [100], ultrapurity of thin films for high-precision optical devices with controlled surface morphology and crystal orientation [101,102], medical implants [103] or in catalytic applications [104] 4. CONCLUSION https://doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv-2023-c75tb-v2 ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8034-8490 Content not peer-reviewed by ChemRxiv.…”

Direct Electrodeposition of High-Purity Iron from Fe₂O₃ in Molten Calcium Chloride

“…In recent years, ironmaking processes including solvent extraction, ions exchange, and electrochemistry have been proposed and developed for the high-purity iron production. [6][7] Wherein the electrochemistry strategy using electrical energy to directly produce iron is relative sustainable and produces less pollution, [8][9][10] therefore, the electrochemical ironmaking strategy has been considered as a great promising method for high-purity metallic iron production.…”

“…[9][10][11] Actually, the electrochemical ironmaking can be realized by both water electrolysis and non-water electrolysis (molten salt electrolysis and molten oxide electrolysis). [7,[12][13][14] Commonly, the low-temperature aqueous solution electrolysis method for the preparation of high-purity iron uses acid/alkaline solvent and soluble ferric chlorides as the electrolyte and iron source, respectively. [15][16][17] In contrast, the molten salt electrolysis strategy is more compatible with raw materials, except for chlorides and oxides, and can even directly use the raw minerals to prepare functional materials, [18] which is undoubtedly conducive to cost reduction.…”