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Recovering Critical Minerals from Alkaline Batteries
Alkaline batteries are produced in their billions every year and are the world’s most popular household battery. Spent alkaline batteries contain valuable amounts of zinc and manganese.
Requirement
Zinc and manganese are on the UK’s critical minerals list, and they are highly valuable to global supply chains. MPI investigated a hydrometallurgical recycling process to recover critical minerals in alkaline batteries, exploiting knowledge developed during work on processes to recycle lithium-ion batteries.
The Project
The project focused on hydrometallurgical processing by exploiting differences in metal solubility behaviour. Laboratory beaker scale trials developed a successful method to create and separate relatively pure zinc and manganese, indicating a successful process proof of concept.
Project Results
The initial step of the process involved a water wash to remove the potassium.
The leaching step was performed using an optimised mix of mineral acid and reductant additive. in deionised water. The optimised conditions led to a ~90% recovery rate from the solid. Inductively Coupled Plasma Spectroscopy (ICP) was used to measure the concentrations of various elements in the leachate.
Reaction at elevated temperature of the leachate with an additional reagent at 110% moles of the combined zinc and manganese resulted in two distinct phases.
The manganese rich phase, precipitated on solution cooling as a brown/orange solid. X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) confirmed the presence of a relatively pure manganese phase.
The zinc phase exhibited greater aqueous solubility and required a gentle boil down to precipitate the phase. This yielded bright blue solids. The XRD results show two zinc phases, further work during scale up will enable separation of these phases.
Hydrometallurgy Services
Our Hydrometallurgy Laboratory is a specialised facility with state-of-the-art equipment enabling research and development of hydrometallurgical techniques for environmentally sustainable metals recovery. We provide hydrometallurgy research and development from laboratory scale to pilot scale. Research includes activities to assess how hydrometallurgical technology can be integrated into other processes.
We work with industry and partners to develop efficient methods to extract metals from minerals or other materials.
More about our Hydrometallurgy Services
For advice and support contact us at enquiries@mpiuk.com
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