There is increasing interest in the development of noble metal separation/recovery processes, especially for applications to "urban mining". Common separation/recovery processes for noble metals use a solvent (liquid-liquid) extraction technique in hydrometallurgy. However, these processes are time-consuming and not environmentally friendly, because they use organic solvents for sequential metal ion extractions. Electrowinning is an alternative approach for selective metal precipitation that involves controlling the redox potentials of electrodes but requires specialized equipment and generates hydrogen as a byproduct at the cathode surface under dilute conditions. In the present study, we investigated selective gold recovery from a homogenous aqueous solution containing a mixture of dilute HAuCl4 and H2PtCl6 (5.0 × 10-5 M each) and aromatic amino acid-containing peptides (2.0 × 10-4 M each). Gold selectivity was determined by analyzing the compositions of the solids and supernatants obtained from the reaction mixtures. A much higher gold selectivity (gold/platinum (Au/Pt) atomic ratio = 7.5) was obtained using an anthracene-containing peptide compared to peptides containing one or two naphthalene ring(s). Our proposed approach is applicable to the sequential separation of several noble metal ions, such as Au, palladium (Pd), Pt, iridium (Ir) and rhodium (Rh), and simply requires developing aromatics suitable for each noble metal of interest.
Keywords: gold; noble metal recovery; peptide; platinum; self-assembly.