Separation Science and Technology, Vol.53, No.1, 161-169, 2018
Nd recovery from magnetic waste and its preliminary analysis by neutron activation analysis
The products of the new information and communication technologies (NTIC), whose life often not exceed three years, became consumables to the computer image and other waste that contains neodymium and praseodymium (rare earths); in this field of management, treatment, and recycling of waste, we propose the recovery of elements such as neodymium and praseodymium, from the super-magnet Nd-Fe-B. Our study provides a simple and inexpensive process. The implementation scheme of our project consists of a first step in developing a plan of experience that has been made specifically to perform the optimization of operating conditions of the precipitation process. This experimental design was inspired by a statistical technique advanced design of experiments known factorial design. The method begins by embrittlement in liquid nitrogen (-196 degrees C), dissolution in an acidic solution and recovered by a unit operation of chemical engineering, we add an oxalic acid solution to precipitate Nd as neodymium oxalate, followed by purification of neodymium and praseodymium. For characterization we used the following techniques. The neutron radiography, the neutron activation analysis (NAA) and the scanning electron microscope coupled with EDX. The identification of the most intense peaks in the XRD spectrum shows the presence of a single compound which hydrated neodymium oxalate chemical formula Nd-2(C2O4)(3)10H(2)O. The counting of spectrum shows that the purity of the precipitate is higher than 99%. Then, the thermal decomposition transforms this powder to neodymium oxide. After the reduction we obtain pure neodymium, the analytical balance shows that this magnet contains 26% of neodymium.
Keywords:Magnet analysis;neutron activation analysis;neutron radiography;rare earths;separation by chemical precipitation