Treatment of manganese-containing materials
AssigneeDeepgreen Engineering, Pte. Ltd.
InventorsWilliam F. Drinkard, Hans J. Woerner, William M. Nixon
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Abstract
An improved method for treating manganese-containing materials, such as seafloor manganese nodules, by leaching with aqueous HNO3 and NO gas, and more particularly to methods for recovering valuable constituents from such nodules, especially manganese, cobalt, nickel, iron, and copper. It also provides a method to leach manganese material to release the titanium, vanadium, cerium, molybdenum and other metals from the manganese oxides and to make them available to be recovered.
Claims20
A method of recovering manganese from materials containing manganese-dioxide (MnO2) and other metal values, comprising the following steps:
- a. leaching the manganese-dioxide containing materials by introducing nitric oxide gas as reducing agent into an aqueous solution of nitric acid to obtain a manganese compound consisting essentially of MnO which is soluble in the aqueous solution of nitric acid, dissolves in the nitric acid, and releases the other metal values into the aqueous solution, and leaving an acid-insoluble residue;
- b. precipitating iron from the aqueous solution as an iron-containing residue;
- c. separating the iron-containing residue from the aqueous solution;
- and
- d. precipitating and recovering manganese as manganese oxide from the aqueous solution.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.