US EPA

3704141 

Journal Article 

Fundamental Study for Resource Recovery From Urban Mine by Magneto-Archimedes Effect 

Matsuura, Y; Miura, O 

2016 

Yes 

I E E E Transactions on Applied Superconductivity
ISSN: 1051-8223 

26 

4 

10.1109/TASC.2016.2547878 

WOS:000377388500001 

As one of the effective methods for valuable resources recovery from urban mine, we propose a magnetic separation using the magneto-Archimedes effect. The magneto-Archimedes effect is a phenomenon that materials levitate at a particular height in a paramagnetic liquid medium by applying a magnetic field gradient. The levitating height depends on only the difference of magnetic susceptibility and density between the liquid medium and the materials. In this paper, we investigated the possibility of recollecting valuable resources selectively from an urban mine by the magneto-Archimedes effect. We studied the magnetic levitating properties for several kinds of valuable materials such as gold, silver chloride, palladium oxide, copper, palladium, platinum, and crashed electronic substrate in manganese (II) chloride aqueous solution as a paramagnetic liquid medium. As a result, gold, silver chloride, palladium oxide, and copper levitated at each different height, whereas palladium and platinum remained sinking at the bottom. We confirmed that the levitating height for each material was almost the same as its own theoretical one. In an experiment for a crashed electronic substrate, we observed only gold levitating at its own height. 

Magneto-Archimedes effect; rare metal; urban mine; valuable resource recovery