Hydrometallurgy Applications

Metals separation

Value added metals can be recovered by recycling them from ores or materials containing metals. Different recovery processes have been developed but they are generally specific for each metal. Today, the separation, at least, of two metals (ins: copper and silver or lead and silver) is not always simple, efficient, affordable and productive.

To address this challenge, Seprosys has studied and developed an ion exchange and chromatographic process to separate, at least, 2 metals (one of each is a cationic metal). Metal salts are dissolved in an acidic solution and separated by ion exchange chromatography on a cationic resin under H+ form with the previously used acid solution as eluent.

Our work is specifically focused on the separation of silver and lead, lanthanum and yttrium or silver and copper.

  This method is easy to set up and enable to recover highly purified metals (over 99% purity in continuous stream) and does not involve any organic solvent.

  This method has been patented.