Lanthanide (Ln) metals are the basis of current technologies due to their unique electronic and optical properties. Due to the inclusion of Lns in televisions, phones, and other high-tech devices, interest in lanthanide metals has grown significantly with regard to selective extraction of these metals from consumer products. Previous studies in our lab focused on lanthanide separations that utilized a carbamoylmethylphosphine oxide (CMPO) based ligand with a tripodal capping scaffold. The two caps that have been previously studied are tris(2-aminoethyl)amine (TREN) and tris(3-aminopropyl)amine (TRPN). The TREN-capped CMPO ligands demonstrated a significant selectivity towards terbium and lanthanides in the middle of the series. The TRPN-capped ligand was predicted to bind to the larger lanthanide metals due to the larger size relative to TREN. The results, however, demonstrated that the TRPN cap led to low lanthanide extraction across the entire series when applying the traditional extraction protocol. In more recent work as discussed in this presentation, we have further probed the f-element extraction properties of the TRPN-capped ligands including studies of actinide extraction from a mixture of metals. A new ligand containing the CMPO group with phenyl substituents linked to a TRPN capping scaffold was synthesized and characterized for our extractions. We explored the variation of the stir times used during the liquid-liquid extraction protocol with the TRPN-capped CMPO ligand with the goal of optimizing f-element extraction.

Variation of ligand caps and substituents of tripodal CMPO-based agents for f-element extraction

2019 Spring National Meeting

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