Recovery of Nickel from Spent Electroless Nickel Plating Baths

With Increasing importance of electroless nickel plating technology in many fields such as electronic and automobile industries, the treatment of the spent baths is becoming a serious problem. These spent baths contain iron and zinc as impurities, organic acids as complexing reagents, and phosphonate ions as oxidized species of tile reducing reagent. as well as several grams per liter of nickel. The spent baths are currently treated by conventional precipitation method. but a mettled with no sludge generation is desired. This work aims at establishing a recycling process of nickel from tile spent baths using solvent extraction. Extraction behaviors of nickel. iron. and zinc in various 쇼pes of real spent baths are investigated as a function of pH using LIX841, di (2-ethylhexyl)phosphoric acid (D2EHPA), and PC88A as tile extractants. Nickel is extracted by LIX84I at the equilibrium pH of more than 6 with high efficiency. For the weakly acid baths. iron and zinc are extracted by D2EHPA or PC88A without adjusting the pH of the baths leaving nickel in the aqueous phase. Stripping of nickel from LIX84I with sulfuric acid is also investigated. It is shown that concentrated nickel sulfate solution (> 100 ㎏-Ni/㎥) is obtained. This solution can be reused in the electroless plating process. Based on these findings, flow sheets for recovering nickel from the spent baths are proposed.