Abstract
An integrated approach has been made to extract potassium and aluminium from a silicate mineral, i.e. nepheline syenite with 5.4% K2O, 19.9% Al2O3, 55.5% SiO2. Chloridising-roasting experiments were carried using CaCl2 at 900 °C for 1 h and water leaching at ambient temperature for 1 h. The leach liquor contains impurities like Ca and Na; hence, selective extraction of potassium was carried out through precipitation using perchloric acid at freezing temperatures. XRD data of the final KCl product obtained after decomposition of KClO4 indicated cubical crystal system and was found to be 99.5% pure. In the second stage, leaching of the residue was carried out with HCl, H2SO4 and H2SiF6. For selective aluminium recovery , sulphuric acid was found to be the better leachant. A 23 full factorial design with time, temperature and acid concentration was used. Finally, aluminium sulphate crystals were produced from the leach liquor after removing iron through pH adjustment.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are thankful to the Director, CSIR-IMMT Bhubaneswar for his kind permission to publish this work. One of the authors (JS) expresses her gratitude to CSIR for providing the fellowship under XII plan period projects. The authors also wish to gratefully acknowledge the assistance rendered by Mr. Pravat K. Behera for XRD studies.
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Samantray, J., Anand, A., Dash, B., Ghosh, M.K., Behera, A.K. (2019). Nepheline Syenite—An Alternative Source for Potassium and Aluminium. In: Azimi, G., Kim, H., Alam, S., Ouchi, T., Neelameggham, N., Baba, A. (eds) Rare Metal Technology 2019. The Minerals, Metals & Materials Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05740-4_15
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