As the individual recycling processes being optimised for the final flowsheets, work has been picking up also on the modelling, engineering and construction of the FIREFLY process at TRL 6. This complex activity is led by the engineering team at 6TMIC.
Over the past six months of regular meetings with R&D partners, engineers have been simulating the electrode kinetics for the electro-leaching (ELX) process developed by TEC. By coupling electrochemical kinetics with homogeneous chemical reaction kinetics, they have achieved an impressive 88 % recovery of V and 36 % recovery of Mo after nine hours of ELX treatment. The experimental parameters have already been transferred to INLECOM to be fed to the ML algorithms and further be integrated in the predictive toolbox. In the meantime, the engineering team at 6TMIC are currently simulating more combinations and setups to ensure their work is finalised by the time the pilot construction kicks off. Each simulation operation runs for approximately 24 hours.
In parallel, researchers at VITO have been leading the gas-diffusion electrocrystallization (GDEx) simulations. These simulations involve around 90 simulations per metal and approximately 270 simulations per mixture, resulting in a plethora of combinations.
The preliminary findings indicate that increasing the current density reduces the recovery time of metals but consequently increases energy consumption. This means that individual metals, such as Pt, Pd and Rh can be recovered in a shorter time when a higher current density is applied. However, this comes at the cost of increased energy consumption. This trade-off needs to be carefully managed to optimize both recovery time and energy efficiency. When working with bi-metallic mixtures, the recovery of metals takes longer due to bulk reactions and competing reactions of metals. However, the energy consumption lowers when a mixture metal solution is treated with GDEx. For tri-metallic mixtures (Pt-Pd-Rh), Pt takes longer to recover than Pd and Rh, which maintain the recovery time as in the bi-metallic mixture. The research team at VITO is working on optimising the kinetics to reduce recovery time and plans to run simulations for other metals such as Mo, W, and V in the coming months.
