Membrane Filtration Enhanced Hydrometallurgical Recovery Process of Indium from Waste LCD Panels

Insufficient recycling of a continuously increasing amount of liquid crystal display (LCD) waste leads to the waste of potentially recyclable materials, especially rare and critical indium. Moreover, landfilling of LCD waste increases the potential for environmental risk. This paper describes a recycling process combining membrane filtration unit processes to hydrometallurgical indium recovery process. The LCD panels were crushed and leached with 1 M H2SO4. 97.4% yields on average were obtained, and a novel finding was made about fast kinetics (2 min for the maximum indium yield). Ultrafiltration was used to remove the dissolved organic material from the leachate, which was concentrated with nanofiltration before liquid–liquid extraction for indium purification. The results showed that commercial polymeric membranes removed more than 90% (from over 3000 mg/L to under 200 mg/L) of the dissolved organic compounds, thus potentially significantly diminishing the detriments caused by these compounds in the liquid–liquid extraction step. The concentration of the leachate with nanofiltration enables the use of smaller processing equipment and to save chemicals in the further steps of the process. The indium content in the leachate was more than five times higher after nanofiltration than after leaching (126 mg/L vs. 677 mg/L). In liquid–liquid extraction, the phase separation took place in only 34 s with the membrane-treated leachate, while with the untreated leachate it remained incomplete even after three hours. The purity of indium was increased from 10 to 74%. From the obtained HCl solution, a 95.5% pure indium product with 69.3% yield was obtained by cementation. Graphical Abstract