Postdoc Student Looking to Purify REEs More Efficiently

Phys.org reported that Dr. Nuwan De Silva, a postdoctoral research associate at the Critical Materials Institute, located at the US Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory, is trying to come up with a way to purify rare earth elements (REEs) more efficiently.

As quoted in the market news:

[Nuwan said]  said CMI scientists are honing in on specific types of ligands they believe will only bind with rare-earth metals. By binding to these rare metals, they believe they will be able to extract just the rare-earth metals without them being contaminated with other metals.

CMI scientists are focusing on certain types of ligands they believe will bind with just rare-earth metals. They will insert a ligand into the acid solution, and it will go right to the metal and bind to it. They can then extract the rare-earth metal with the ligand still bound to it and then remove the ligand in a subsequent step. The result is a rare-earth metal with little or no contaminants from non rare-earth metals. However, because the solution will still contain neighboring rare-earth metals, the process needs to be repeated many times to separate the other rare earths from the desired rare-earth element.

Click here to read the full Phys.org report.