The Separation and Concentration of Titanium(IV) from Sulfuric Acid Solution with Trioctylamine

This paper presents research on separating and concentrating titanium(IV) from aqueous sulfuric acid solution, using trioctylamine (TOA) as extractant and kerosene as a diluent. We investigated the effects of reaction time, temperature, sulfuric acid concentration, organic/aqueous phase ratio, TOA concentration, and titanium concentration on the removal efficiency of titanium(IV). The results show that it is possible to recover over 99% of titanium(IV) after 15 min reaction time by TOA from the sulfuric acid solution under the optimum operation conditions and the loading capacity of TOA for titanium (IV) is 30 g Ti(IV)/100 g TOA. We expect that results studied would be applicable to separate and concentrate titanium from secondary sources such as red mud produced in the aluminum/alumina industry.