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Location and stability of europium in calcium sulfate and its relevance to rare earth recovery from phosphogypsum waste

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Published/Copyright: July 30, 2016
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American Mineralogist
From the journal American Mineralogist Volume 101 Issue 8

Abstract

Rare earth elements (REE) are technology drivers, essential for applications ranging from clean energy technologies to biomedical imaging. Thus they are “critical elements” and it is desirable to find additional RE domestic sources and explore green extraction technologies to overcome their supply risk. Phosphogypsum, a major byproduct of the phosphate fertilizer industry, incorporates a significant amount of RE from the apatite source rock and thus is a potential alternate source of RE. To know the accessibility and extractability of RE from phosphogypsum, it is important to understand the location and nature of RE binding. Here, we report the synthesis of analogs of RE-doped phosphogypsum, with europium (Eu) as a model RE. Using several characterization tools we conclude that the majority of Eu is on the surface of the calcium sulfate crystal as a separate secondary phase, namely a metastable amorphous/nanocrystalline precipitate in which Eu is associated with phosphate and sulfate as counterbalancing ions. The rapid precipitation at low temperature could be responsible for this behavior, which may not represent equilibrium, and our experiments are comparable in the timescale with the fast phosphogypsum precipitation in the industrial process. These results suggest that the Eu is not entrapped by ionic substitutions in the calcium sulfate lattice. Thus RE should be extracted relatively easily from phosphogypsum using methods that extract the RE from its surface.

Keywords: Phosphogypsum; rare earth elements; thermodynamics; spectroscopy

Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the Critical Materials Institute, an Energy Innovation Hub funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Advanced Manufacturing Office. Authors thank Annie Kresting and Zurong Dai at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for SEM-EDS measurements. Funding was also provided by by the National Institute of Health, NIH NIBIB EB018378-01 (for D. Yu)

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Received: 2016-1-15
Accepted: 2016-3-27
Published Online: 2016-7-30
Published in Print: 2016-8-1

© 2016 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.2138/am-2016-5684
Keywords for this article
Phosphogypsum; rare earth elements; thermodynamics; spectroscopy

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Highlights and Breakthroughs
  2. A new approach to the ionic model
  3. Highlights and Breakthroughs
  4. Na-P concentrations in high-pressure garnets: A potentially rich, but risky P-T repository
  5. Special Collection: Perspectives on Origins and Evolution of Crustal Magmas
  6. Crystal accumulation in a tilted arc batholith
  7. Research Article
  8. A tale of two garnets: The role of solid solution in the development toward a modern mineralogy
  9. Special Collection: Apatite: A Common Mineral, Uncommonly Versatile
  10. The crystal structure of svabite, Ca5(AsO4)3F, an arsenate member of the apatite supergroup
  11. Special Collection: Apatite: A Common Mineral, Uncommonly Versatile
  12. From phosphates to silicates and back: an experimental study on the transport and storage of phosphorus in eclogites during uplift and exhumation
  13. Special Collection: Apatite: A Common Mineral, Uncommonly Versatile
  14. Fluorapatite-monazite-allanite relations in the Grängesberg apatite-iron oxide ore district, Bergslagen, Sweden
  15. Special Collection: Apatite: A Common Mineral, Uncommonly Versatile
  16. Solid solution in the apatite OH-Cl binary system: Compositional dependence of solid-solution mechanisms in calcium phosphate apatites along the Cl-OH binary
  17. Special Collection: Advances in Ultrahigh-Pressure Metamorphism
  18. Dissolution-reprecipitation metasomatism and growth of zircon within phosphatic garnet in metapelites from western Massachusetts
  19. Special Collection: New Advances In Subduction Zone Magma Genesis
  20. Origin and petrogenetic implications of anomalous olivine from a Cascade forearc basalt
  21. Versatile Monazite: Resolving Geological Records and Solving Challenges in Materials Science
  22. Monazite age constraints on the tectono-thermal evolution of the central Appalachian Piedmont
  23. Research Article
  24. A new EPMA method for fast trace element analysis in simple matrices
  25. Research Article
  26. Location and stability of europium in calcium sulfate and its relevance to rare earth recovery from phosphogypsum waste
  27. Research Article
  28. A preliminary valence-multipole potential energy model: Al-Si-H-O system
  29. Research Article
  30. Optical phonons, OH vibrations, and structural modifications of phlogopite at high temperatures: An in-situ infrared spectroscopic study
  31. Research Article
  32. Redox states of uranium in samples of microlite and monazite
  33. Research Article
  34. Effects of differential stress on the structure and Raman spectra of calcite from first-principles calculations
  35. Research Article
  36. Oxygen diffusion and exchange in dolomite rock at 700 °C, 100 MPa
  37. Research Article
  38. Fluid inclusion examination of the transition from magmatic to hydrothermal conditions in pegmatites from San Diego County, California
  39. Letter
  40. Nanoscale gold clusters in arsenopyrite controlled by growth rate not concentration: Evidence from atom probe microscopy
  41. New Mineral Names
  42. New Mineral Names
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