Wenzhong Zhang, a group member of Ion Exchange for nuclear waste treatment and for recycling group (University of Helsinki) and Koen Binnemans from KU Leuven, Belgium have co-authored an article about novel material considering the separation of rare-earth elements. The article was selected to themed collection 2017 Journal of Materials Chemistry A HOT Papers. The work was done as a collaboration between our group and Prof. Koen Binnemans’ group at KU Leuven (Belgium) under the umbrella of EU H2020 MSCA ETN REDMUD project. In their work, short n-alkyl chains were covalently attached to titanium(IV) phosphate functionalised mesoporous MCM-41 silica. A high separation between scandium and lanthanum was achieved and the hybrid material showed similar performance on seperation between dysprosium and neodymium as typical tri-n-butyl phosphate (TBP) based solvent extraction setups. The study provides a new insight to produce inorganic–organic hybrid sorbents based on the structure of organophosphorus extractants via metal(IV)–O–P bonds.
The article can be found on the publisher's website: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2014/ta/c7ta08127h#!divAb…
More information about EU H2020 MSCA ETN REDMUD project: https://etn.redmud.org/