Triflimide Effect in Solvent Extraction of Rare-Earth Elements from Nitric Acid Solutions by TODGA

ABSTRACT

Outer-sphere interactions play an important role in the liquid-liquid extraction and separation of metal ions and they could be used to tune the efficiency and selectivity of recovery. Here, we report the extraction behaviour and separation of trivalent rare-earth elements from aqueous nitric acid solutions with N,N,N’,N’-tetra-n-octyl diglycolamide (TODGA), which was preliminarily contacted with an aqueous solution of N-H acid bis[(trifluoromethyl)sulfonyl]imide (triflimide, HTf₂N; Tf = CF₃SO₂) resulting in an adduct TODGA⋅HTf₂N. We examined in detail the extraction system composed of TODGA acidified with HTf₂N and 1,2-dichloroethane as diluent. The effect of various experimental conditions such as the nature of diluent, aqueous nitric acid concentration, and TODGA⋅HTf₂N concentration in the organic phase was studied. It has been found that the distribution coefficient values for metal ions are much greater, especially at low aqueous acidity in the extraction systems with the acidified organic solvent phase. Furthermore, the heavier lanthanides were effectively extracted and the intergroup lanthanide selectivity was greatly improved (separation factors for the Lu/La pair increased by 40 and 2 times for the two systems under study, respectively).

KEYWORDS:

• Solvent extraction
• selectivity
• rare-earth elements
• TODGA
• N-H acid bis[(trifluoromethyl) sulfonyl]imide
• separation

Acknowledgments

The research was carried out within the state task of ISSP RAN and IMTHPM RAN and was financially supported by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this article.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/07366299.2023.2249952

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Alexander N. Turanov: Conceptualisation, Investigation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review&editing. Vasilii K. Karandashev: Investigation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the The research was carried out within the state task of ISSP RAN and IMTHPM RAN and was financially supported by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation..