Jérémie Gouyon, PhD student of the Urban Mines Chair, will rely on “Development of a laboratory on an innovative chip for the capture of strategic metals in a very diluted environment for analysis and recycling”.
His defense will take place on Friday, October 25, 2019 at Chimie ParisTech. He will present during this day, his work conducted during the past three years.
For an overview of these texts, here is a summary:
Analytical sciences are increasingly associated with sustainable production objectives through two approaches: the characterization of products and processes before and after a recycling process, and the development of new green analytical recycling methodologies for their recovery. In particular, waste electrical and electronic equipments (WEEE) are nowadays considered as urban mines because of their composition, rich in metallic species of interest. For the latter, there are different methods of analysis, before and after recycling, using conventional technologies (ICP-AES, ICP OES, XRD, X-ray fluorescence).
In this work, we propose to make an innovative contribution in this field by developing a lab-on-a-chip implementing the coupling between electrophoretic separation and amperometric detection. Compared to existing technologies, this type of device will serve not only as an analytical tool for real-time monitoring of an industrial recycling process, but also as a recycling tool with the potential recovery of precious metals (Platinum, Palladium and Gold) in solid form by electrochemical depletion. The development of a recovery strategy was thus explored, thanks to the integration of composite microelectrodes for the detection of precious metals from acid leachate within a reversible microsystem with multiple advantages compared to conventional microsystems. Such a flow system has been adapted for metal depletion with rates close to 80%.