Integrated Leaching and Separation of Metals Using Mixtures of Organic Acids and Ionic Liquids

In this work, the aqueous phase diagram for the mixture of the hydrophilic tributyltetradecyl phosphonium ([P44414]Cl) ionic liquid with acetic acid (CH3COOH) is determined, and the temperature dependency of the biphasic region established. Molecular dynamic simulations of the [P44414]Cl + CH3COOH + H2O system indicate that the occurrence of a closed “type 0” biphasic regime is due to a “washing-out” phenomenon upon addition of water, resulting in solvophobic segregation of the [P44414]Cl. The solubility of various metal oxides in the anhydrous [P44414]Cl + CH3COOH system was determined, with the system presenting a good selectivity for CoO. Integration of the separation step was demonstrated through the addition of water, yielding a biphasic regime. Finally, the [P44414]Cl + CH3COOH system was applied to the treatment of real waste, NiMH battery black mass, being shown that it allows an efficient separation of Co(II) from Ni(II), Fe(III) and the lanthanides in a single leaching and separation step.

Coherent wavefield subtraction for diffraction separation

Diffractions encode subwavelength information and superior illumination but are weak in amplitude and strongly interfere with the more dominant reflected wavefield. Accordingly, the successful separation of diffractions in geophysical applications still forms a major direction of research. Confronting this challenge, an automatable and versatile framework for the separation of interfering wavefields through a sequence of coherent data summation and subtraction is proposed. In contrast to other studies using coherence measurements, the method specifically targets reflected contributions, which are normally favored in automated summation schemes, and it adaptively subtracts the resulting reflection stack from the input data. Complementing this natural selectivity of stacking, a variety of wavefront filters is presented, which can be derived from the local maximization of the semblance norm and additionally inform the subsequent separation step. Complex 2D and 3D synthetic pre- and poststack seismic examples together with a ground-penetrating radar field-data example suggest that the presented scheme can be applied to a variety of data configurations and bears the potential to uncover an extremely faint but surprisingly rich diffraction background that was previously not accessible for dedicated processing.

EoR imaging with the SKA: the challenge of foreground removal

Abstract21-cm observations of the Cosmic dawn (CD) and Epoch of Reionization (EoR) are one of the high priority science objectives for SKA Low. One of the most difficult aspects of the 21-cm measurement is the presence of foreground emission, due to our Galaxy and extragalactic sources, which is about four orders of magnitude brighter than the cosmological signal. While end-to-end simulations are being produced to investigate in details the foreground subtraction strategy, it is useful to complement this thorough but time-consuming approach with simpler, quicker ways to evaluate performance and identify possible critical steps. In this work, I present a forecast method, based on Bonaldi et al. (2015), Bonaldi & Ricciardi (2011), to understand the level of residual contamination after a component separation step, and its impact on our ability to investigate CD and EoR.