Publikationsrepositorium - Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf

A total of 230.000 tons of the so called “Theisenschlamm”, a waste material of the former copper shale processing in the Mansfeld region, was deposited between the years 1978 and 1990. Besides about 20 wt.-% of zinc and minor amounts of lead, copper and tin, this material also contains valuable strategic elements, like rhenium and germanium. Nowadays rhenium is used as an important alloying element in nickel-base superalloys, or in catalysts.
The r⁴-project “Theisenschlamm” aims at a recovery of the valuable metal content by bioleaching, followed by element specific separation methods. An effective method for the selective separation and concentration of metals is solvent extraction where an organic phase is used to extract the elements of interest from an aqueous phase. But since the metal concentrations in the bioleaching solution are low, the processing is challenging. However, there are multiple parameters allowing an optimization of the solvent extraction process. The findings for a selective enrichment of rhenium from synthetic (bioleaching) solution will be presented in this talk.