Abstract:
The mineral resources of platinum group metals are predominately localized in South Africa and Russia, the resources of PGMs in China is quite scarce, but China is the world"s largest consumer of platinum group metals, mainly used in the field of catalyst manufacturing. Therefore, the efficient recovery of PGMs form secondary resources is a major strategy to solve the contradiction supply and demand of PGMs in China. In this review, the resource reserve, consumption and supply distribution and secondary resource recovery of PGMs were discussed in detail, and focuses on the recovery process of PGMs from spent automotive catalysts with cordierite-based honeycomb monolith morphology. Hydrometallurgical process mainly include direct dissolution of valuable components and supporter dissolved to enrichment PGMs, the pretreatment of spent automobile catalyst is the key factor to improve the leaching efficiency of PGMs, although some hydrometallurgical process have the benefits such as flexible production process, low cost, high PGMs recovery efficiency, and widely applied, but their disadvantages of hazardous waste must be carefully evaluated. Pyrometallurgical process include efficient chloride salt extraction of PGMs and metal capture enrichment PGMs, the collector include copper, lead, iron and matte, the technology has the advantages of simplified process, highly enrichment efficiency and easily scale production. The advantages and disadvantages of various process are summarized, based on the environmental pollution, high energy consumption and low recovery of PGMs, a new approach for recovery of platinum group metals in spent automotive catalysts by a cost-effective, low temperature, environment friendly and pollution-free capture technology via Bismuth was proposed , and a new direction for efficient enrichment of PGMs from spent automobile catalysts were provided.