Shenzhen Advanced Institute and others found that graphene can be used to efficiently recover gold resources from e-waste

Gold is widely used as a good conductor of electricity in the fields of electronic products and consumer goods

Recently, Shenzhen University of Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (tentative name)/Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences/Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences Cheng Huiming and Tsinghua University Shenzhen International Graduate School, and researchers from the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom discovered that the controllable preparation of reduced graphite oxide The graphene material has a strong ability to extract trace amounts of gold resources in e-waste.

This study found that the microstructure of this graphene material determines its gold adsorption performance, and the combined effect of its graphene region and oxygen-containing functional group region (oxidation region) is the key to achieve its excellent gold adsorption and extraction performance

The research work was published in Nature Communications under the title Highly Efficient and Selective Extraction of Gold by Reduced Graphene Oxide

Figure 1 Schematic diagram of graphene extraction of gold

Figure 2 (a) Graphene dispersion (left) and graphene film (right); (b) schematic diagram of continuous adsorption of trace gold based on graphene film and (c) adsorption efficiency; (d) graphene from electronic waste Schematic diagram of the process of recovering gold