A technology that recovers palladium, a precious metal used across industries, with world-leading efficiency has been developed.
Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) said on the 14th that a research team led by Choi Jae-woo, principal researcher at the Water Cycle Research Center, and Kim Jin-young, principal researcher at the Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Research Center, developed an eco-friendly palladium recovery technology based on titanium-based MXene nanosheets. The study was published on the 12th of last month in the international journal "Advanced Functional Materials."
Palladium is a material that serves as an excellent catalyst even in very small amounts and is used in a variety of industries and everyday products, including smartphones and semiconductor production processes. However, because production is concentrated in a few countries, supply is unstable, and even when trying to recover it from waste, a lack of technology to efficiently recover it in the mildly acidic wastewater environments of industrial sites means a significant amount is discarded.
The research team developed a thin-sheet material in which titanium oxide nanoclusters with unsaturated oxygen are densely arranged on the surface of an MXene nanomaterial. The team said the material demonstrated a palladium adsorption capacity of 1,983 mg per g in 30 minutes, proving superior performance to existing adsorbents that show adsorption performance of 1,000 mg or less over hundreds of minutes.
They added that it maintains 90% efficiency even after more than 10 repeated uses and that the recovered composite can be directly recycled as a hydrogen-evolution catalyst, enabling use as a precious metal circulation system. They also emphasized that it can be used at room temperature and does not require strong acidic chemicals, cutting carbon emissions by more than 80%.
Choi said, "By making it easy to recover precious metals that used to be discarded in spent catalysts and electronic waste, this will serve as a technological turning point that can contribute to the self-reliance of Korea's resource-circulation system and reduce dependence on imported precious metals," adding, "We plan to increase commercialization prospects with a modular recovery system."