Scandium is a raw material with properties that promise considerable potential for application in alloys to enable aviation fuel savings and as dopants for use in sustainable energy production using solid oxide fuel cells. Despite these attractive properties, scandium is rarely used due to its scarcity and unreliable supply. Therefore, new strategies for scandium recovery are of economic priority. In this study, polymer inclusion membranes (PIMs) consisting of PVDF-HFP, 2-NPOE and DEHPA, were optimised for selective scandium separation from real TiO₂ production waste. With the optimised system, >60% of the scandium was recovered with high selectivity, resulting in scandium mole fraction at more than two orders of magnitude higher in the receiving phase than in the original waste. This suggests PIMs may be an effective way to recover scandium from bulk waste, thus easing the scarcity and insecurity that currently limit its bulk application.

钪是一种原材料，其特性有望在合金中应用相当大的潜力，以节省航空燃料，并作为掺杂剂用于使用固体氧化物燃料电池的可持续能源生产。尽管有这些吸引人的特性，但由于其稀缺性和不可靠的供应，钪很少使用。因此，新的钪回收策略具有经济优先性。在这项研究中，对由 PVDF-HFP、2-NPOE 和 DEHPA 组成的聚合物包合膜 (PIM) 进行了优化，用于从真正的 TiO _{2中选择性分离钪}生产废料。通过优化的系统，>60% 的钪以高选择性回收，导致接收阶段的钪摩尔分数比原始废物高两个数量级以上。这表明 PIM 可能是从大宗废物中回收钪的有效方法，从而缓解目前限制其大宗应用的稀缺性和不安全性。