As an important industrial material, antimony is mainly used as the flame retardant in plastics and electronic products, energy storage material in liquid metal batteries and semiconductors, and hardening material in military application. Because of limited storage, uneven distribution in the world and non-renewable characteristics, antimony was first listed as scarce mineral resources by the European Union, and included in the strategic mineral protection directory by the United States. Antimony recovery is therefore attracting more and more attention. In this study, crystallization of antimony as cubic crystal antimony trioxide which is one of widely used species was adopted to recovery antimony from water. Parameters such as initial antimony chloride concentration, induced crystalline species, crystallization reagent, and modifier are optimized, and the produced crystal was characterized by XRD, SEM-EDS and FTIR. Results showed that cubic Sb2O3 can be recovered from solution with product of cubic antimony trioxide as seed, OH- as crystallization reagent provided by ammonia chloride, and tartaric acid as modifier. The best crystallization efficiency was achieved as high as 98% at initial antimony concentration of 500 mg/L, pH of 8.0-9.0, and ratio of tartaric acid to antimony as 2:1. SEM-EDS showed that the product was with octahedral appearance and the elements detected were antimony and oxygen. Furtherly XRD results demonstrated that the product was cubic crystal Sb2O3. The predominant size of the crystalized particle was less than 50 μm which will be further increased by control operation paremeters later. The main reason to produce cubic Sb2O3 was deducted as that tartaric acid modified the hydrolysis process of Sb4O5Cl2 under alkaline condition maintained by ammonia salt. Induced crystallization using cubic antimony trioxide as a seed crystal is a promising technology to recover antimony from antimony containing leachate by hydrochloric acid.

Removal and recovery of antimony from water by induced crystallization

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