Microfluidic lab-on-chip advances for liquid–liquid extraction process studies

Abstract

The ever-increasing complexity of industrial product recycling calls for more efficient purification processes such as liquid–liquid (L/L) extraction. Because of the high complexity of L/L extraction, optimizing a large-scale extraction is both time and resource consuming and can only be justified to solve high volume and value purification problems. It is therefore difficult to apply to small scale and highly variable waste material influx. We believe using a fully automated and integrated microfluidic approach will enable fast and cost-effective studies of L/L extraction processes. This review presents an overview of L/L metal extraction performed using microfluidics platforms. We first give an overview of the extraction methods. We then review the most relevant characterization methods integrated with such platforms.