Simultaneous in situ extraction of uranium and lithium from salt lake by magnetic field assisted pulse chromatography

Description

The paper documents in detail the experimental data in this paper. We found that a liquid film may exist on the surface of the packing in the columns. To further verify the role of the liquid film and the effect of the magnetic field environment, we loaded two columns. The first was a PMMA-packed column, and after a section of the column was pulsed through the salt lake simulant, we collected the solution in segments. It was found that there was a variability in the concentration of uranium and lithium in each small segment. To amplify this variability, we explored further by adding an external horseshoe magnet. Mg/Li separation in a salt lake is quite difficult, so we needed a lower Mg/Li ratio in one segment to achieve Mg/Li separation. In another section of the solution we wanted a higher U/Li ratio to confirm that the uranium and lithium were being separated effectively. However, according to the data, the effect of the horseshoe magnet did not allow us to extract both lithium and uranium because we could not find a section of the solution with a low Mg/Li ratio and another section with a high U/Li ratio. Therefore, we switched to a ring magnet with a stronger magnetic field and placed it in an “S-N” configuration. The results show that only in this case the results are good and the peak times of the ions are as we expected. In addition, we compared the columns with SiO2 packing, and found that there was indeed a difference in the ion motion state with and without magnetic field, further confirming the effect of magnetic field. However, the SiO2 packing was found to be less effective than the PMMA packing, which may be attributed to the abundant functional groups on the surface of the PMMA material.

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