A chelating ion exchanger for gallium recovery from alkaline solution using 5-palmitoyl-8-hydroxyquinoline immobilized on a nonpolar adsorbent

The recently developed method of gallium recovery from alkaline solution by alkanoyl oxine/chloroform extraction has been improved by immobilizing palmitoyl oxine on hydrophobic macroporous styrene-divinylbenzene copolymer Amberlite XAD-2 and passing the Ga-containing alkaline solution of pH 13.5 through the synthesized resin column. The developed column showed reasonable efficiency after successive passages, and the selectivity of Ga over Al was very high, suggesting the utilizibility of the method in Ga recovery from the basic aluminate liquor of the Bayer process. The Ga capacity of the oxine-based resin was 3.94 mu mol/g. Two mg Ga retained on 10 g resin could be eluted with 25 mL of 2 N HCl at a throughput rate of 2 mL/min. The developed process has prospective use in Ga separation from Al in a strongly alkaline solution.