Synthesis and Certification of Lanthanum Oxide Extracted from Monazite Sand

Synthesis and certification of lanthanum oxide extracted from monazite sand have been carried out. This research aimed to increase the added value of monazite sand and obtain the lanthanum oxide in-house certified reference material (CRM). Synthesis of lanthanum oxide consists of several stages, namely: monazite sand digestion, rare-earth elements hydroxide [REE(OH)3] precipitation, Ce separation, Nd separation, lanthanum oxalate precipitation, and calcination. Certification of lanthanum oxide was carried out by determining the average concentration of the oxides and its uncertainty from the seven accredited laboratories by the ISO 35-2006 statistical method. Two other minerals in the lanthanum oxide analyzed by the XRD method were cerium hydroxide [Ce(OH)3] and neodymium yttrium oxide fluoride (Nd2Y2O3F16). Lanthanum oxide certified contains ten oxides, with the two highest concentrations of La2O3 (91.662 ± 0.007)% and Nd2O3 (3.949 ± 0.002)%. Lanthanum oxide has met the qualification in-house CRM since it contained water less than 1%, was homogeneous, stable, and certified. La2O3 concentration in the lanthanum oxide in-house CRM from CSAT-BATAN, Indonesia was not significantly different in comparison to that from the Department of Chemical Engineering, Srinakharinwirot University, Thailand. Lanthanum oxide extracted from monazite sand can be used as reference material in determining the lanthanum oxide quality from the pilot plant process.

Experimental Determinations of Mixing Times in the IronArc Pilot Plant Process

IronArc is a newly developed technology and an emerging future process for pig iron production. The long-term goal with this technology is to reduce the CO2 emissions and energy consumption compared to existing technologies. The production rate of this process is dependent on the stirring, which was investigated in the pilot plant process by measuring the mixing time in the slag bath. Moreover, slag investigations were done both based on light optical microscope studies as well as by Thermo-Calc calculations in order to determine the phases of the slag during operation. This was done because the viscosity (which is another important parameter) is dependent on the liquid and solid fractions of the slag. The overall results show that it was possible to determine the mixing time by means of the addition of a tracer (MnO2 powder) to the slag. The mixing time for the trials showed that the slag was homogenized after seconds. For two of the trials, homogenization had already been reached in the second sample after tracer addition, which means ≤8 s. The phase analysis from the slag indicated that the slag is in a liquid state during the operation of the process.

Effects of various chemical cleaning conditions for pressured MF process

A pilot-scale pressured hollow-fiber microfiltration (MF) process as pretreatment for the reverse osmosis process was studied and operated under various conditions to assess the relative influence of backwashing, chemical enhanced backwashing (CEB), and bag filter application. The pilot plant process consisted of backwashing but without the CEB or the bag filter as the first step of the research. As the second step of the research, the impact of the backwashing on permeability recovery was assessed at different intervals followed by the influence of CEB on flowrate recovery. Results from operating the pilot-scale hollow-fiber membrane modules for more than 1 year have demonstrated that the appropriate pore size of bag filters was 25–50 μm and the optimized backwashing process was every 30 minutes with 25 mg/L of NaOCl, and CEB with an interval of 10 cycles with the use of 100 mg/L NaOCl.