CD Laboratory for Optimization and biomass utilization in heavy metal recycling

The aim of the research is to optimise recycling processes for residues containing heavy metals. Residues containing significant quantities of valuable metals such as zinc, lead and copper are of particular interest.

Growing environmental awareness and the rising cost of metals are making the efficient recovery of metals from industrial waste increasingly sensible. The process technology required for this is to be optimised in the CD Laboratory.

A fundamental area of research is concerned with the melting and reduction behaviour of the materials to be recycled. A better understanding of these processes is a prerequisite for their optimisation. The use of biomass as a reducing agent enables CO2-neutral removal of oxygen (reduction) from the melt of the residue and, in some cases, higher quality of the metals to be recycled. To this end, the reaction behaviour of the biomass and the other factors influencing the reduction are analysed in detail.

Another research focus is the analysis of the behaviour of impurities such as halogens in the residues in order to subsequently remove these impurities from the residue. This would increase the quality of the recovered materials and allow them to be used in a variety of applications.

In addition, the recycling processes are modelled using thermodynamic calculations. This allows balances to be drawn up on the use of energy and CO2 emissions across the entire process. This is an essential prerequisite for recording the interaction between the individual optimisation steps. However, process solutions for the simultaneous recovery of several valuable metals from the same material can also be calculated using such balances or models. In addition, the quality of the recovered products - and therefore their potential area of utilisation - is also illustrated. The similarity of the residual materials to be analysed allows the development of basic model calculations with a wide range of possible applications.

In this way, the research contributes to optimising the extraction of valuable metals from residues containing heavy metals.