Studies on Uranium Recovery by Activated Carbon Impregnated With Tridodecylamine and Tributyl Phosphate

Abstract

Two solvent impregnated activated carbon materials were prepared for uranium recovery from its aqueous sulfate solutions using tridodecylamine (TDA) and tributyl phosphate (TBP). This was achieved by direct adsorption of each extractant onto the solid phase (dry method). The obtained adsorbents demonstrated that the loading capacity of TDA and TBP have attained 0.69g and 0.85g per 1g activated carbon (AC) respectively which were characterized by means of Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR). For the two materials, the relevant factors such as contact time, solution pH, initial uranium ion concentration, volume of aqueous solution to the weight of the impregnated activated carbon ratio and the extraction temperature were optimized by equilibrium batch experiments using uranium synthetic sulfate solution. The obtained uranium loaded from the latter on 1g of each of TDA-AC and TBP-AC was 45mg and 89mg respectively. Desorption of the loaded uranium was carried out using hydrochloric acid which was found to be 66% for TDA-AC and 93.5% for TBP-AC respectively. Based on the obtained optimum factors, the practical applicability of the two developed impregnated solid phases was then examined upon a uranium sulfate leach liquor prepared from Abu Zeneima uraniferous mineralization.

Application of silica-based sorbents to extraction of rare earth elements from loparite processing products

“…It is possible to get over the limitations by using TBPbased sorbents [9][10], and solid extractants (TVEX) in which TBP is non-covalently bound to a solid carrier [8,[11][12]. Both organic polymers and inorganic compounds (for example, widely applied silica) can be used as a matrix or carrier [13][14].…”