Adsorption–Precipitation Method to Recover Gallium, Aluminum and Alkali from the Gallium Electrolyte in Zinc Refinery Plant

It is a waste of gallium resource to discard the high aluminum-containing gallium electrolyte. The Ga/Al separation is difficult by only using lime precipitation because of high gallium loss rate. The present study employs an adsorption resin LSC-600P to recover gallium in the simulated gallium electrolyte and then uses lime to remove aluminum, leaving only alkali solution recycled. The results showed that the aluminum removal rate in the gallium electrolyte was 93.12% under the conditions of reaction temperature of 85 °C, addition of lime 2 times to the theoretical molar ratio of calcium to aluminum, reaction time of 3 h and stirring speed of 600 r/min. In the experiments of gallium adsorption, after six adsorption–desorption cycles, the adsorption rate of gallium by LSC-600P resin still reached 98.6%, and the adsorption rate of aluminum was lower than 4.5%. In the desorption process, the desorption rate of gallium was more than 98%, and the aluminum content in the stripping solution after desorption was almost negligible. The resin exhibits high adsorption affinity for gallium while demonstrating minimal adsorption for aluminum.