Description

Rare earth elements (REEs) are essential ingredients for developing modern industry as well as designing and developing high technology products used in our daily lives. However, China monopolizes the supply chain for rare metals, and there have been growing concerns around limited supply in other countries. As such, there is demand for intensive research into the recovery of REEs from a large amount of the wastes produced in various industry links, including radioactive residues, polishing powders, catalysts, magnetic materials, batteries, etc., because they can play an important role in the resource supply. Therefore, in this chapter, we introduced the main application of acid‐leaching process as a hydrometallurgical method to obtain the REEs from waste containing rare earths; the effective application of acid‐leaching process is discussed through the leaching behavior of rare earths in acidic solution and the synthesis method of target rare earth during acid leaching for purifying it from non–rare earth. The devised τ − T diagram application to the hydrometallurgical method for selective acid leaching is also discussed using the leaching kinetics of rare earth in acidic solution and might be helpful to further corroborate the future plans for technical scale with recovery effectiveness of REEs.

Chapter