Highly efficient recovery of platinum, palladium, and rhodium from spent automotive catalysts via iron melting collection

Abstract Automobile catalysts sector is the largest consumption field of platinum group metals (PGMs) worldwide, and they are the most important secondary resources of Pt, Pd, and Rh once they reach the end of life. However, recycling PGMs from spent automotive catalysts is of great difficulty due to their complex physicochemical characteristics and low concentrations. A highly efficient technology for recovery of Pt, Pd, and Rh by iron melting collection was proposed. Owing to the same face-centred cubic structure and close atomic radius, iron powder is used as collector since Fe and PGMs can form continuous solid solution. PGMs are concentrated and formed Fe-PGMs alloy phase at a relatively low temperature of 1300–1400 °C through adjustment of slag compositions. The principles of slag design were put forward, and the effects of basicity, slag compositions and collector dosage on the recovery efficiency of PGMs were studied. Factsage 7.0 software (CRCT-Thermfact and GTT-Technologies) was used to calculate slag viscosity and simulate slag reaction equilibrium during the melting process. The recovery efficiency of PGMs was 99.25 % under the optimized conditions: mass ratio of CaO/Na2O=35:20, CaF2 5 wt.%, Na2B4O7 8.5 wt.%, collector Fe 15 wt.%, and 5 wt.% C, where the concentration of Pt, Pd and Rh in slag phase were 2.398, 3.879, and 0.976 g/t, respectively. Meanwhile, the formation of ferrosilicon (FeSi2, FeSi) was avoided. 50 kg pilot-scale experiments also achieved over 99 % recovery efficiency of PGMs.