Lanthanide elements have been declared nationally critical due to their widespread use in a wide variety of technologies and modern military equipment and can experience supply fluctuations. As the US moves towards developing its own supply of these elements, recycling lanthanide cations from disposed materials has come to the forefront. In order to accomplish this, it is important that these valuable elements be recovered in an environmentally friendly and cost effective manner. The extraction and deposition of Er was the focus of this study. Initial efforts focused on developing the fundamental coordination chemistry of ‘simple’ Er salts, amides, and alkoxides to understand the extraction processes available. Once established the deposition of these compounds using electrochemical and chemical processes was undertaken. Due to standard solvent limitations for electrochemical processes, ionic liquid reduction was studied. Our studies exploring erbium’s coordination chemistry, their behavior in a variety of ionic liquids using single crystal X-ray diffraction, Extended X-ray Absorption Fine Structure spectroscopy (EXAFS), and electrochemical evaluation will be presented.<br/><br/>_______________________<br/>This work was supported by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program at Sandia National Laboratories. Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory managed and operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000

Recycling of the nationally critical element erbium: Electrochemical reduction of erbium coordination compounds in ionic liquids

249th National Meeting (2015)

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