The fundamentals of rare earth flotation with ionic liquid collectors

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The demand for rare earth elements (REE) has spiked in recent years due to their increasing usage in numerous high-technology applications, including high strength permanent magnets, phosphors for electronic displays, applications in a variety of renewable energy technologies, and as alloying agents in metals.**There are approximately one hundred million tons of proven rare earth oxide reserves in the world, scattered across more than 30 countries. However, 97% of the world's supply currently originates in China. Increased development in China has prompted the Chinese government to limit yearly export quotas to approximately 35,000 tons of rare-earth oxides, while non-Chinese yearly demand is expected to reach 80,000 tons by the year 2015. This program aims to remove as much of this lack of knowledge as possible, and to introduce novel methods of flotation, namely through the use of ionic liquids as collectors. The long term goal of this program is to develop efficient methods of selectively recovering rare earth minerals, and to initiate the development of a new series of flotation reagents based upon ionic liquids.**Ionic liquids are slats that are molten at temperatures lower than 100 degrees Celsius, and different functional groups can be inserted into the structure to facilitate the removal of various metal ions from aqueous systems. This program will develop functionalised ionic liquids to attach specifically to rare earth cations on the mineral surface, and will include a hydrophobic component to attach to air bubbles in a flotation cell.**This program is investigating the processing of rare earth minerals specifically, but it is envisaged that there will be spin-off projects into processing base metal ores using ionic liquids.**Throughout this program, a total of nine HQP will be trained. These include one post-doctoral researcher, two PhD students, one MEng student and five undergraduate researchers.