Dissolution Kinetics of Lanthanides from Abu Tartur Phosphate Rocks, with Tartaric acid

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Nuclear Materials Authority. P.O. Box 530, El Maddi, Cairo, Egypt

2 Chemistry Department, Faculty of Science, Ain Shams University

Abstract

Phosphate rock is one of the most important REEs secondary resources. Accordingly, this work focuses on the selective
leaching of REES from Abu-Tartur phosphate rock using Tartaric acid solution. The influence of various factors affecting the
leaching process such as reaction time, acid concentration, liquid/solid mass ratio, reaction temperature and stirring speed
were thoroughly studied to estimate the favor REEs dissolution in relation to P2O5. The leaching data shows that 90.5 and
26.8 % of REEs and P2O5 respectively could be leached from phosphate rock after 60 min using 1.0 M Tartaric acid and 5/ 1
liquid/ solid, mL/ g, ratio at room temperature with mechanical stirring of 300 rpm. The application of graphical and
statistical approaches for the analysis of kinetic data revealed that the rate of REEs leaching from Abu-Tartur phosphate rock
using Tartaric acid is determined by the ash layer diffusion step. The apparent activation energy for the dissolution process
was calculated as 12.43 kJ/mol. The dissolution process could be expressed by the following semi-empirical kinetic equation:
[1 − 3(1 −𝛼)
2
3 + 2(1 − 𝛼)] = 0.22 𝑒
−12431⁄𝑅𝑇�

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