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Applications of molten salt and progress of molten salt electrolysis in secondary metal resource recovery

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Abstract

Molten salt is an excellent medium for chemical reaction, energy transfer, and storage. Molten salt innovative technologies should be developed to recover metals from secondary resources and reserve metals from primary natural sources. Among these technologies, molten salt electrolysis is an economic and environment-friendly method to extract metals from waste materials. From the perspective of molten salt characteristics, the application of molten salts in chemistry, electrochemistry, energy, and thermal storage should be comprehensively elaborated. This review discusses further directions for the research and development of molten salt electrolysis and their use for metal recovery from various metal wastes, such as magnet scrap, nuclear waste, and cemented carbide scrap. Attention is placed on the development of various electrolysis methods for different metal containing wastes, overcoming some problems in electrolytes, electrodes, and electrolytic cells. Special focus is given to future development directions for current associated processing obstacles.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51621003) and the Beijing Natural Science Foundation (No. 2204073).

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  1. College of Materials Science and Engineering, Key Laboratory of Advanced Functional Materials, Education Ministry of China, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, 100124, China

    Xiao-li Xi, Ming Feng, Li-wen Zhang & Zuo-ren Nie

  2. National Engineering Laboratory for Industrial Big-data Application Technology, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, 100124, China

    Xiao-li Xi & Zuo-ren Nie

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  1. Xiao-li Xi
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Xi, Xl., Feng, M., Zhang, Lw. et al. Applications of molten salt and progress of molten salt electrolysis in secondary metal resource recovery. Int J Miner Metall Mater 27, 1599–1617 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12613-020-2175-0

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