Liquid–liquid extraction: thermodynamics–kinetics driven processes explored by microfluidics

Liquid–liquid extraction processes, characterized on-line by instrumented microfluidic platform, significantly enhance the development of predictive thermodynamic models, such as ienaics, and lay the foundations for new approaches to improve kinetic models which combine transport and chemistry. Instrumented microfluidics enables precise measurement of free energy of transfer of species at equilibria and their associated characteristic transfer times, faster and more accurately than its batch mode counterpart. Computer controlled and fully automatized, our platform illustrated the kinetic differences of high extraction’s of Ytterbium (Yb) and Iron (Fe), two elements reported as having very different extraction efficiencies due to different molecular forces competing with complexation when modifiers are used together with extractants. Once collected and processed, the kinetics show two distinct behaviors of these two metallic elements: depending on the temperature, Fe could display a very slow extraction profile when compared to Yb.