Abstract
Recovery of rare earth elements (REEs) from coal samples collected from the Fire Clay coal seam using diluted mineral acid solutions was investigated. The initial processing step was coal recovery using conventional froth flotation which concentrated the REEs in tailing material resulting in an upgrade to values around 700 ppm on a dry whole mass basis. Leaching experiments were performed on the flotation tailings material using a 1.2 M sulfuric acid solution adjusted to a temperature of 75 °C to study the extractability of REEs from coal material. The effect of particle size, leaching time, leaching temperature, and solid concentration on REE leaching recovery were evaluated. The kinetic data obtained from leaching over a range of temperatures suggested that the leaching process follows the shrinking core model with possibly a mixed control mechanism that may be a result of several heterogenous materials leaching simultaneously. Leaching recovery increased rapidly at the beginning of the reaction then slowed as the system reached equilibrium. The apparent activation energy determined from test data obtained over a range of temperatures using 1 M sulfuric acid was 36 kJ/mol for the first 20 min of reaction time and 27 kJ/mol for the leaching period between 20 and 120 min. The leaching of light REEs during the initial stage was determined to be driven by a chemical reaction, followed by the formation of a product layer, which required lower activation energy in the later stage of leaching. In regards to the heavy REEs, the major mechanism for leaching is desorption and the product layer formation does not affect the heavy REEs significantly.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
5-27-2020
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.3390/min10060491
Funding Information
This research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Grant Number DE-FE0029900.
Related Content
The following are available online at www.mdpi.com/2075-163X/10/6/491/s1, Table S1: Solid loss and REs content in leaching solid residue and leachate solution.
It is also available for download as the additional file listed at the end of this record.
Repository Citation
Yang, Xinbo and Honaker, Rick Q., "Leaching Kinetics of Rare Earth Elements from Fire Clay Seam Coal" (2020). Mining Engineering Faculty Publications. 9.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/mng_facpub/9
Supplementary File 1
Notes/Citation Information
Published in Minerals, v. 10, no. 6, 491, p. 1-18.
© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.