Recovery of precious metal catalysts with supercritical water oxidation

摘要

Incineration is the traditional method used to recovery precious metals from spent catalysts, but it has a number of drawbacks, particularly from an environmental point of view. Now a British - Swedish joint venture, involving Chematur Engineering AB and Johnson Matthey, has developed a process that uses supercritical water oxidation to recover the precious metals. The technology, called AquaCat, offers organic destruction efficiencies of close to 100%, but without any of the problems associated with incineration.