The extraction of nickel with the use of supported liquid membrane capsules

In the past few years there has been an increase in environmental awareness. This has forced industries to be more careful with the waste they generate. The cleaning and upgrading of metal-containing wastes have become a very demanding assignment. The reclamation of nickel from waste streams has the additional advantage that it is a very valuable metal and the process can be profitable. A new approach to supported liquid membrane extraction, whereby the strip solution is encapsulated within a microporous membrane capsule, was used for the experiments. The capsule constitutes an unconfined reactor and does not have the disadvantage of an excessively high cost to configure the required packing density (m(1)/m(3)). The capsule has the additional advantage that very high acid concentrations can be used in the strip solution without the risk of high corrosion. The research shows that there is a correlation between the extraction of nickel with capsule membrane- and supported liquid membrane extraction, except at high acid strip concentrations, where osmosis occurs. Extraction of 95 g/m(2) was obtained at an initial rate of 10 g/m(2) . h.