Finney, AR;
Lectez, S;
Freeman, CL;
Harding, JH;
Stackhouse, S;
(2019)
Ion Association in Lanthanide Chloride Solutions.
Chemistry
, 25
(37)
pp. 8725-8740.
10.1002/chem.201900945.
Preview |
Text
Ion Association in Lanthanide Chloride Solutions.pdf - Published Version Download (2MB) | Preview |
Abstract
A better understanding of the solution chemistry of the lanthanide (Ln) salts in water would have wide ranging implications in materials processing, waste management, element tracing, medicine and many more fields. This is particularly true for minerals processing, given governmental concerns about lanthanide security of supply and the drive to identify environmentally sustainable processing routes. Despite much effort, even in simple systems, the mechanisms and thermodynamics of LnIII association with small anions remain unclear. In the present study, molecular dynamics (MD), using a newly developed force field, provide new insights into LnCl3 (aq) solutions. The force field accurately reproduces the structure and dynamics of Nd3+ , Gd3+ and Er3+ in water when compared to calculations using density functional theory (DFT). Adaptive-bias MD simulations show that the mechanisms for ion pairing change from dissociative to associative exchange depending upon cation size. Thermodynamics of association reveal that whereas ion pairing is favourable, the equilibrium distribution of species at low concentration is dominated by weakly bound solvent-shared and solvent-separated ion pairs, rather than contact ion pairs, reconciling a number of contrasting observations of LnIII -Cl association in the literature. In addition, we show that the thermodynamic stabilities of a range of inner sphere and outer sphere LnCl x ( 3 - x ) + coordination complexes are comparable and that the kinetics of anion binding to cations may control solution speciation distributions beyond ion pairs. The techniques adopted in this work provide a framework with which to investigate more complex solution chemistries of cations in water.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Ion Association in Lanthanide Chloride Solutions |
| Location: | Germany |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1002/chem.201900945 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1002/chem.201900945 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2019 The Authors. Published by Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
| Keywords: | ion pairing, lanthanides, molecular dynamics, potential of mean force, rare-earth elements |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Chemical Engineering |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10120366 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
