Purification of Wet-Process Phosphoric Acid via Donnan Dialysis with a Perfluorinated Sulfonic Acid Cation-Exchange Membrane.

This work reports the application of an electromembrane process, Donnan dialysis (DD), for the purification of so-called wet-process phosphoric acid (WPA). Nitric acid is used as the stripping solution to remove metallic cations (mostly Fe, Al, and Mg) that are harmful to the further processing of WPA. The paper first presents a set of experimental data on the measurements of the metallic cation fluxes through a perfluorinated sulfonic acid cation-exchange membrane. Not only WPA, but also synthetic phosphoric acid solutions with mixed metallic cations (MPA) and with a single metallic cation (SPA) were studied. This confrontation confirms (1) that the order of metallic cations fluxes is Mg > Al > Fe; (2) that, compared with MPA, the purification effect of WPA causes only negligible change; (3) that, by comparing the DD processes with SPA and MPA solutions, the reason for the low transmembrane fluxes of Fe and Al could be explained by the large ionic charge and large hydrated ion radius. Furthermore, by analyzing the ion composition of membranes equilibrated in SPA solutions, we conclude that the forms of cations in the membrane are most likely Fe, Al, and Mg.