Using Ion-Exchange to Recovery of Germanium from Waste Optical Fibers by Adding Citric Acid

Germanium is the raw metal of the optical fibers which become more important with the rapid development of optical communication in recent years. Owing to the importance of germanium and the problematic of waste optical fibers, we using the hydrometallurgical process to recovery germanium in this study. The process can be divided into two parts, the first part is pretreatment and leaching, the second is separation and metal recovery. In the first part, we collected the optical fibers and dissolved them by roasting and leaching. Then, the separation process which we used is ion-exchange. At the ion-exchange process, IRA900 is chosen as the resin and citric acid as the new addition agent, and other parameters were also considered. Finally, the metal oxides, GeO₂, was obtained from the separation process through concentration and calcination. With the optimal conditions, the recovery rate of germanium is about 99%. The purity of obtained products is over 99%.