Reactors for vanadium batteries

Instruflow is specialized in the design, manufacture and supply of high pressure reactors for vanadium extraction and purification.

For decades, high pressure reactors and pressure vessels have been in use for a number of research purposes and applications. Of late, they have gained considerable significance in important applications involving production of advanced batteries and storage units.

One of the latest applications for such high pressure autoclaves and pressure vessels is extraction and refining of vanadium for batteries. Due to the wide application of metallic vanadium in aerospace, hydrogen storage devices, nuclear industry, and superconducting alloys, the extraction and refining methods of metallic vanadium have developed rapidly. V2O5 is an important intermediate vanadium product obtained from vanadium ore smelting and extraction. Traditionally, Titaniferous magnetite ore is partially reduced with coal in rotary kilns and then melted in a furnace. This produces a slag containing most of the titanium and a pig iron containing most of the vanadium. After removing the slag, the molten pig iron is blown with oxygen to form a new slag containing 12–24 percent vanadium pentoxide (V2O5), which is used in the further processing of the metal.Vanadium is extracted from carnotite as a coproduct with uranium by leaching the ore concentrate for 24 hours with hot sulfuric acid and an oxidant such as sodium chlorate. After removal of solids, the leachate is fed into a solvent extraction circuit where the uranium is extracted in an organic solvent consisting of 2.5-percent-amine–2.5-percent-isodecanol–95-percent-kerosene. Vanadium remains in the raffinate, which is fed into a second solvent extraction circuit. There vanadium in turn is extracted in the organic phase, stripped with a 10 percent soda ash solution, and precipitated with ammonium sulfate. The ammonium metavanadate precipitate is filtered, dried, and calcined to V2O5.

Researchers across universities are working on solving these limitations by working on standalone and multiple pressure reactors.

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