News

For its Group Research & Development located in Olen (Belgium), Umicore is currently looking for an Innovation Project Manager. This is a final call for candidates with a PhD or Master degree in chemical, metallurgical or environmental engineering.

Isadora Reis Rodrigues is a PhD student at the Department of Materials Engineering at KU Leuven. She is working on the magnetic separation of rare-earth ions, under the supervision of Prof. Jan Fransaer and Prof. Koen Binnemans

On March 29, 2018, the kick-off event for GloREIA took place in Brussels. GloREIA is to become a new, global association for the rare earth industry. To kickstart this association EIT RawMaterials provides financial support.

In the framework of the ERC SOLCRIMET project KU Leuven researchers have found that replacement of water by ethylene glycol provides enhanced selectivity in the solvent extraction of transitions metals from rare earth elements.

The colleagues from TU Darmstadt and Fraunhofer IWKS in Germany present material-to-material (direct) recycling approaches for NdFeB magnet alloys. The paper is published in the Journal of Sustainable Metallurgy.

This new Hydrometallurgy paper by Kumar Batchu and Binnemans studies the effect of the diluent) on the solvent extraction of Nd using D2EHPA as extractant. Studied diluents varied from aliphatic, aliphatic-aromatic to aromatic.

On March 9, 2018, Bieke Onghena (SIM² KU Leuven) obtained her PhD degree in Chemistry. She successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled ‘Ionic liquid solvent extraction (SX) for the recovery of rare earths (REEs) and cobalt (Co).

ETN SOCRATES and METGROW+ have published a joint Policy Brief on the Social License to Operate for the Mining and Recycling of Critical Metals, which is meant to stimulate this crucial debate for the EU mining/metallurgy sector.

Ionic liquids (ILs) are widely studied to recover metals from ores or end-of-life products, but not above 100 °C and atmospheric pressure. Here the IL [Hbet][Tf2N] was used dry to leach NdFeB magnets and scrap at high temperature.

Following the Social License to Operate Symposium in Leuven (Feb’ 21, 2018, Artefact), Dirk Draulans (a renowned science journalist), produced a three-page article for Knack, Flanders’ leading political (weekly) magazine.