Michael Vischmidt

Ruthenium Cannot Be Mined Into Existence: Recovery from PGM Refinery, Semiconductor and Catalyst Effluent by Deep-Vacuum Phase Separation

Ruthenium is the platinum-group metal that the semiconductor industry has quietly made indispensable, and it is the one metal whose supply cannot respond to price. World production is approximately 30 tonnes per year, obtained exclusively as a by-product of platinum and nickel re...

Praseodymium Without a Licence: Recovery of the Nd/Pr Pair from Magnet Leachates, Magnet-Plant Effluent and Phosphogypsum by Deep-Vacuum Phase Separation

Praseodymium is almost never sold as praseodymium. It leaves the refinery bound to neodymium as the NdPr alloy known as didymium, because praseodymium and neodymium are adjacent lanthanides whose separation factor in solvent extraction is close to unity, and splitting them demand...