The Role of Specific Ion Effects in Ion Transport: The Case of Nitrate and Thiocyanate

TL;DR

This study investigates how nitrate and thiocyanate ions differently influence lanthanide extraction by examining their molecular interactions at interfaces, revealing key differences that explain selectivity trends in solvent extraction.

Contribution

The paper provides molecular-level insights into how specific background anions affect ion transport and selectivity in solvent extraction, using advanced spectroscopic and diffraction techniques.

Findings

Nitrate adsorbs without major changes to interfacial structure.

Thiocyanate significantly alters water structure and monolayer ordering.

Differences in ion adsorption explain selectivity reversal in extraction processes.

Abstract

The selective transport of trivalent rare earth metals from aqueous to organic environments with the help of amphiphilic "extractants" is an industrially important process. When the amphiphilic extractant is positively charged or neutral, the coextracted background anions are not only necessary for charge balance but also have a large impact on extraction efficiency and selectivity. In particular, the opposite selectivity trends observed throughout the lanthanide series in the presence of nitrate and thiocyanate ions have not been explained. To understand the role of background anions in the phase transfer of lanthanide cations, we use a positively charged long-chain aliphatic molecule, modeling a common extractant, and gain molecular level insight into interfacial headgroup-anion interactions. By combining surface sensitive sum frequency generation spectroscopy with X-ray reflectivity and grazing incidence X-ray diffraction, we observed qualitative differences in the orientational and overall interfacial structure of nitrate and thiocyanate solutions at a positively charged Langmuir monolayer. Though nitrate adsorbs without dramatic changes to the solvation structure at the interface or the monolayer ordering, thiocyanate significantly alters the water structure and reduces monolayer ordering. We suggest that these qualitatively different adsorption trends help explain a reversal in system selectivity toward lighter or heavier lanthanides in solvent extraction systems in the presence of nitrate or thiocyanate anions.