报告题目：A Multiscale Understanding of Solvent Extraction for Rare Earth Elements Refinery

报告人：Baofu Qiao (Argonne National Laboratory)

时间：2016年06月17日下午14:30-16:00

地点：苏州大学独墅湖校区医学楼402栋一楼会议室

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               2016年06月13日

报告摘要：Rare earth elements (REEs), also termed as ‘Strategic Metals’, root their applications in a broad range of energy and environment related products, from smartphones to hybrid cars to MRI imaging to wind power generators, and so on. The refinery of REEs becomes particularly urgent given the rapidly increasing demand, the pressure to recycle as well as their uneven global distributions. Even though the REE refinery techniques have been developed dating back to the WWII, our understanding of the refinery process is still quite limited, which surely hinders the fast development of the related applications. By tightly coupling synchrotron X-ray technologies (SAXS, EXAFS, etc.) and large-scale atomistic molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, we have studied the influences of metal coordination on the mesoscale morphology of metal-centered aggregates in organic phases, and how the aggregate morphology affects the macroscopic properties (i.e., extraction efficiency, selective separation). In particular, it is found the metal-centered aggregates are interacting with each other via the dipolar interactions. The stronger inter-aggregate interactions favor elongated aggregates, which consequently leads to the higher metal extraction efficiency. Moreover, the inter-aggregate interactions are also found to play a critical role in the selective separations between different REE metals.