Selective Roasting of Nd–Fe‒B Permanent Magnets as a Pretreatment Step for Intensified Leaching with an Ionic Liquid

Abstract

Oxidative roasting of Nd–Fe‒B permanent magnets prior to leaching improves the selectivity in the recovery of rare-earth elements over iron. However, the dissolution rate of oxidatively roasted Nd–Fe‒B permanent magnets in acidic solutions is very slow, often longer than 24 h. Upon roasting in air at temperatures above 500 °C, the neodymium metal is not converted to Nd2O3, but rather to the ternary NdFeO3 phase. NdFeO3 is much more difficult to dissolve than Nd2O3. In this work, the formation of NdFeO3 was avoided by roasting Nd–Fe‒B permanent magnet production scrap in argon atmosphere, having an oxygen content of pO2≤10-20atm, with the addition of 5 wt% of carbon as an iron reducing agent. For all the non-oxidizing iron roasting conditions investigated, the iron in the Nd–Fe‒B scrap formed a cobalt-containing metallic phase, clearly distinct from the rare-earth phase at microscopic level. The thermal treatment was optimized to obtain a clear phase separation of metallic iron and rare-earth phase also at the macroscopic level, to enable easy mechanical removal of iron prior to the leaching step. The sample roasted at the optimum conditions (i.e., 5 wt% carbon, no flux, no quenching step, roasting temperature of 1400 °C and roasting time of 2 h) was leached in the water-containing ionic liquid betainium bis(trifluoromethylsulfonyl)imide, [Hbet][Tf2N]. A leaching time of only 20 min was sufficient to completely dissolve the rare-earth elements. The rare-earth elements/iron ratio in the leachate was about 50 times higher than the initial rare-earth elements/iron ratio in the Nd–Fe‒B scrap. Therefore, roasting in argon with addition of a small amount of carbon is an efficient process step to avoid the formation of NdFeO3 and to separate the rare-earth elements from the iron, resulting in selective leaching for the recovery of rare-earth elements from Nd–Fe‒B permanent magnets.