Separation and recovery of heavy metals in chloride complexing solutions based on principles of electrochemical engineering

This paper describes the selective recovery of heavy metals from a chloride contg. soln. The goal is to recover each heavy metal with high purity and yield by electrodeposition. The soln. contains four different heavy metals (Zn, Pb, Cu and Cd), high amts. of NaCl and KCl and the pH is low (.apprx.0.7). Polarisation curves show that the sepn. of the 4 metals present in the synthetic soln. is in principle possible by electrodeposition at a fixed cathode potential. The sepn. of Cu and Pb from the other heavy metals have been studied in more details using rotating disc electrodes and electrodeposition at const. potential. The obtained results show that Cu and Pb can be electrodeposited in a high purity from the reaction medium. [on SciFinder (R)]