Recovery of vanadium and tungsten from spent selective catalytic reduction catalyst by alkaline pressure leaching

Improving the efficiency of precious metal recovery from spent Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) catalyst provides economic benefits and promises sustainable use of resources. Here we demonstrate highly efficient alkaline pressure leaching method for the extraction of vanadium (V) and tungsten (W) from spent SCR catalyst. We analyzed the effects of experimental parameters such as the stirring speed, leaching agent concentration, leaching temperature, liquid-to-solid ratio, and leaching time. The Box-Behnken design of experiments and the response surface methodology have been employed to understand the impact of the leaching parameters and the impact of their interactions on the leaching rate of V and W. The results showed that the leaching agent concentration significantly promoted the recovery of V and W; the influence of the reaction temperature and leaching time moderately increased the leaching rate of the metals. Moreover, the efficiency of the alkaline pressure leaching technique was determined by the interactions between leaching time and reaction temperature, and the relationships between reaction temperature and leaching agent concentration. By using the response surface methodology, the optimal leaching conditions were found that the leaching agent concentration was 4.75 mol-1, the leaching temperature was 190 °C, and the reaction time was 44.5 min, and the predicted values of V and W leaching rates were 95.76% and 98.36%, respectively. Based on the excellent fitting between modeling and experimental results demonstrated in this work, we conclude that our study can shed light on the development of highly efficient and sustainable metal recovery strategies for practical applications.

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This work was supported by National Water Pollution Control and Management Technology Major Projects (2014ZX07201-009-04), and “123 Project” of Environmental Research and Education in Liaoning Province (CEPF2013-123-1-4).