Tool and Workflow for Systematic Design of Reactive Extraction for Separation and Purification of Valuable Components

With reactive extraction, separation as well as purification can be realized for a wide palette of applications ranging from phosphorous recovery from sewage sludge to separation of rare-earth metals from electronic waste in the context of urban mining. Goal of process design then has to be to find an optimal selection of reactive ex-tractant, diluent, possible additional components, as well as all process parameters. This requires a deep understanding of the chemistry of the underlying complexations as well as engineering expertise on extraction-process as well as equipment design.
To solve this design task a tool was developed based on cascaded option trees (A. Bednarz, B. Rüngeler, A. Pfennig, Chem. Ing. Tech. 2014, 86(5), 611-620, DOI: 10.1002/cite.201300115), which combines the expertise from both sciences. The process design is on the one hand supported by a prototypic work flow and on the other hand by systematically structured and quantitative information on the underly-ing thermodynamics. The combination of these building blocks constitutes a design tool, which can guide through the systematic design of a reactive-extraction process for solving any of the separation tasks encountered in the areas mentioned in the introduction.