Trans. Nonferrous Met. Soc.

China 30(2020) 3147−3160

Research and development trends of hydrometallurgy:

An overview based on Hydrometallurgy literature from 1975 to 2019

Li-pan JIA1, Jiang-jiang HUANG1, Ze-long MA1, Xu-heng LIU1,

Xing-yu CHEN1, Jiang-tao LI1, Li-hua HE1, Zhong-wei ZHAO1,2
1. School of Metallurgy and Environment, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China;
2. Hunan Key Laboratory for Metallurgy and Material Processing of Rare Metals, Changsha 410083, China
Received 20 November 2019; accepted 11 September 2020

Abstract: Modern hydrometallurgy has been developing for more than 100 years and the related articles keep piling up.
Based on a bibliometric analysis of the articles in Hydrometallurgy, the most authoritative journal in the field of
hydrometallurgy, we try to catch the research and development trends from a global perspective. Firstly, keywords
burstness shows that rare earth, recycling, lithium, ionic liquid, and thorium are the hotspots in recent years, and
the economic and technological reasons behind them were discussed in depth. Secondly, the proportion of
biohydrometallurgy grows fast from 5% to 13% and the related articles are almost all about bioleaching. There are some
new directions such as direct preparation of materials in hydrometallurgical processes and ion-imprinted techniques.
Thirdly, the advanced instrument analysis methods such as XAFS (X-ray absorption fine structure), gene sequencing,
and micro-CT promote the deep understanding of hydrometallurgy mechanism. Finally, the cooperation network and
contribution of the main institutes were mapped.
Key words: development trends; leaching; solvent extraction; biohydrometallurgy; electro-hydrometallurgy; CiteSpace

microbiological technology continued to inject

1 Introduction vitality into hydrometallurgy. Now, with the decline
of ore grade and increasingly strict environmental
The history of hydrometallurgy may be traced protection wants, the wet process plays a more and
back to the period of alchemists. In China, it can be more important role in producing nonferrous
traced back to the Western Han Dynasty in 200 AD, metals, and the challenges it faces are increasing
when there were records about cementation of too. In this work, we hope to make statistical
copper by iron from copper sulfate solution [1]. analysis of the most authoritative journal
Modern hydrometallurgy began with two important Hydrometallurgy, to find out the changes of
processes at the end of the 19th century: the Bayer research contents and methods, the current hotspots,
process for alumina and the MacArthur–Forrest and the world pattern of hydrometallurgy.
process for gold [2]. Later, owing to the Why did we choose the Hydrometallurgy
development of the nuclear industry during the journal to analyze the research and development
Second World War, solvent extraction and ion trends of hydrometallurgy? In 1975, Gordon Ritcey
exchange were developed sharply. In the 1950s, the from CANMET (the Canada Centre for Mineral and
pressure leaching method was developed to treat Energy Technology) and Neville Rice from the
sulfide ores. Furthermore, electrochemistry and University of Leeds founded Hydrometallurgy,
Foundation item: Project (2019JJ40377) supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province, China; Project (2020CX026)
supported by the Innovation-Driven Project of Central South University, China; Project (51934010) supported by the
Major Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China
Corresponding author: Zhong-wei ZHAO, Tel: +86-731-88830476; E-mail: [email protected]
DOI: 10.1016/S1003-6326(20)65450-4
3148 Li-pan JIA, et al/Trans. Nonferrous Met. Soc. China 30(2020) 3147−3160

which belongs to the Elsevier group. Their original analyzing and visualizing in bibliometrics. The
aim was to launch a multidisciplinary journal that software integrates many programs to achieve
drew upon chemistry, engineering, mineralogy, works including text mining, network pruning,
economic and environmental principles and brought clustering and naming, and burstness detection. The
together papers that focused on the fundamentals processing results can be visualized in the form of
and application of hydrometallurgical processes that knowledge maps [8]. The basic items of a map
would otherwise be scattered among various include nodes, connections, and colors. A node
journals or conference proceedings with limited represents a keyword, an author, an institute, or a
circulation [3]. At that time, Hydrometallurgy was a reference. The connections of the nodes show
relatively young discipline with focus on the the co-citations of references, co-occurrences of
pressure leaching of sulfides, the extraction of keywords, or cooperation of authors or institutes.
uranium, solvent extraction of base metals, rare The radius of a node represents the times and the
earth metals and so on, bacterial leaching and gradual colors represent the period, blue earlier and
chloride process, and the treatment of the three orange later. The purple outer rings represent the
wastes (waste gas, wastewater, and industrial centrality.
residue) [3,4]. Meanwhile, the Hydrometallurgy
journal ranks 8/76 in the area of metallurgy and 2.2 Data
metallurgical engineering. Considering that the first The bibliographic data of Hydrometallurgy
7 journals are prone to material researches, it was collected from Scopus and Web of Science
is the most influential journal in the field of (WOS) with a period of 45 years (1975−2019).
hydrometallurgy. There are 4694 records in Scopus (excluding the
It has been 45 years since the first issue of reviews), and 4445 in WOS. Through the analysis
Hydrometallurgy. By the end of 2019, the and comparison of the data, we find that the
ScienceDirect gathered more than 4500 articles. information before 1997 is incomplete, losing a
There are so many papers, how can we analyze large number of author keywords and references.
them? With the rapid development of science and The earlier data of Scopus are relatively complete.
technology, the articles in many areas, such as The data of the two databases after 1998 are almost
biology, medicine, and computer, are increasing the same. Scopus can provide independent
rapidly. It is difficult for researchers to keep retrievals for the abstracts and author keywords, so
collecting, arranging, and analyzing the information the retrieval based on Scopus is more flexible and
through reading. Scientists hope to rely on accurate.
computer aids to solve this problem [5,6]. The
scientific knowledge map originated from a seminar 3 Results
organized by the National Academy of Sciences of
the United States in 2003, is a good way. It aims at The number of articles and the total cited times
analyzing, structuring, and visualizing the big data of Hydrometallurgy each year are shown in Fig. 1.
of the literature for easy understanding, with the The number of articles has two leaps from 1975 to
help of computer technology. There are many 2019, 50 articles average each year before 1992 to
science mapping analysis tools, such as Sci2, 100 articles from 1992 to 2010, and 175 articles
SciMAT, VOSviewer, and CiteSpace. Using one of after 2010. It can be seen from the total cited times
the knowledge tools, CiteSpace, we hope to catch that the influence of the journal has been
the development trends of hydrometallurgy from significantly promoted. Time lag leads to a decline
the articles. after 2010. The statistical data from WOS shows
that the impact factor of Hydrometallurgy rises
2 Methods and data from 0.575 in 1997 to 3.465 in 2018. Locating in
Q1 (the first quartile) in the area of metallurgy
2.1 Methods and metallurgical engineering and ranking 8/76,
CiteSpace, developed by CHEN [7] in 2006, is Hydrometallurgy is the most influential journal in
a Java program and it is powerful for literature the field of hydrometallurgy.
 Li-pan JIA, et al/Trans. Nonferrous Met. Soc. China 30(2020) 3147−3160 3149
weapons, and nuclear power. Correspondingly,
there are two epochs: immediately after the end of
the Second World War, through the early 1970s,
uranium was largely used for defense purposes;
from the middle 1970s forward, uranium was
largely used as an input into electricity production,
with nuclear power reactors. With the large-scale
application of nuclear power, the price of U3O8
soared rapidly (from less than 44 US$/kg to nearly
132 US$/kg) until the reactor at Three Mile Island
suffered a partial meltdown in March of 1979.
Almost overnight, the interest in nuclear energy in
the U.S. waned; the demand for uranium collapsed,
along with the price of the resource, and plans to
Fig. 1 Yearly distribution of articles and total cited times build new plants were put on hold [9]. The revival
(1975−2019) of nuclear power in recent years has been mainly
due to the growing demands for energy in
3.1 Thematic trends developing countries represented by China (There
First of all, thematic trends are identified in the are presently 19 nuclear reactors under construction
way of burst keywords (measured by the frequency in China [10]) and concerns about climate change.
change of the keywords) as shown in Table 1. Certainly, the two booms led to two upsurges in
“Strength” based on a statistical formula, is used to uranium extraction research.
measure the burstness of keywords. From 1987 to 1992, adsorption and carbon
Uranium has two main uses, that is, nuclear become hot keywords. This reflects the activated

Table 1 Thematic trends based on keywords burstness (The red line indicates that the keywords appeared more
frequently in that year)
Keywords Strength Timespan

Uranium 6.6067 1975▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂1997*

Adsorption 5.6754 1975▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂1997*

Carbon 5.2988 1975▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂1997*

Biosorption 6.3259 1998▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂2019

Heavy metal 5.2761 1998▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂2019

Indium 4.6150 1998▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂2019

Recycling 5.2679 1998▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂2019

Rare earth 13.845 1998▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂2019

Thorium 4.9042 1998▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂2019

Uranium 4.1215 1998▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂2019

Lithium 4.1873 1998▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂2019

Ionic liquid 4.0219 1998▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂2019

*
Due to the missing of keywords before 1998, the burstness detection was based on the phrases extracted from the titles
3150 Li-pan JIA, et al/Trans. Nonferrous Met. Soc. China 30(2020) 3147−3160

carbon adsorption process in the 1980s which is a and Korea together with the economic crisis of
milestone for gold extraction. The gold extraction at 2008 dropped the price of indium to 400 US$/kg
that time reached a climax and there are economic which cooled the research on indium. What’s more,
reasons behind it. Gold can be traded freely in 1967 the articles often lag behind research for 2−5 years.
and the price was 1.23 US$/g. Later, because of So we can see that there are more articles on
inflation and economic recession, people lose “indium” in 2010 and 2011.
confidence in the financial system, therefore, gold The most obvious hotspot in recent years has
was favored. The price of gold underwent the first been rare earth. Because of the excessive
big leap in history, from less than 1.76 US$/g in the exploitation of rare earth and environmental
early 1970s to 14.11 US$/g in the 1980s, with a deterioration, the government of China controlled
peak of over 21.16 US$/g [11]. the exploitation and export of rare earth, which had
From 2002 to 2005, “biosorption” and “heavy caused the rare earth crisis in the years 2010−2012.
metal” become hot keywords. This reflects a Then, the rising price of rare earth attracted a huge
research upsurge about biological adsorption of amount of capital. Statistic data showed that the
heavy metals from wastewater. The biomass used capital inflows of 28 rare-earth-related Junior
for adsorption includes bacteria, algae, plant residue, Mining Companies had risen to 1.09×1010
and so on. The heavy metals are mainly copper, US$ (2010, 2011) and 2.06×1010 US$ (2012) from
lead, cadmium, and chromium. The search results about 1×109 US$ before 2010 [14,15]. Undoubtedly,
from WOS show that the articles on biosorption and some of these capitals flowed to and promoted the
heavy metals have been continuously increasing research of rare earth extraction. For thorium, on
since then. Therefore, our results do not reflect the one hand, it is commonly associated with the rare
research trends. This is because there are more earth elements in different minerals. The separation
excellent journals to choose for this type of article, of thorium from rare earth is one of the most
such as Bioresource Technology, Chemical important tasks for the REE process. Meanwhile,
Engineering Journal, and Water Research. there are a large amount of leaching residues of the
Recycling related papers are all about metal ion-absorbed-rare-earth ores in the south of China,
resource recycling. With the industrialization of which enrich radioactive elements like thorium and
developing countries, the demand for base uranium. And the radioactive pollution promotes
metals is steadily increasing, and the intelligent the extraction and separation of thorium and
manufacturing and green manufacturing need more uranium [16]. So, the growing of articles on
and more special rare metals like lithium and rare thorium is largely due to the increase of rare earth
earth. The imbalance between supply and demand researches. On the other hand, thorium has been a
leads to price growth, which inevitably makes the potential nuclear fuel that can make up the shortage
unprofitable recycling industry more and more of uranium resources. All these lead to the booming
profitable. As the European Commission report on of thorium extraction and separation.
critical raw materials and the circular economy said, For lithium, as we all know, it is the rapidly
a few materials have a good rate of recycling at increasing demand for batteries to power electric
end-of-life (e.g. recycling rate for PGMs reaches up cars, laptops, and other high-tech devices that
to 95% for industrial catalysts and 50%−60% for promote the research of lithium. More than half of
automotive catalysts) [12]. As a matter of course, the researches are about lithium extraction from salt
recycling research will become hotter and hotter. lake brine, and the rest from seawater and
From 2003 to 2006, the price of indium lepidolite. Moreover, the recycling of spent lithium
increased from 100 U$/kg to a peak of batteries is getting hot.
1000 US$/kg, which drove the research hotspot The first article about keywords ionic liquids
later. However, when the price began their climb to in Hydrometallurgy appeared in 2006 for palladium
over 1000 US$/kg the improvement and scale-up of extraction from nitric acid [17], and the number
ITO (indium tin oxide) recycling techniques increased to 14 documents in 2017. Recent
became a priority to ITO target manufacturers researches have focused on the separation of rare
serving the LCD (liquid crystal display) earth, precious metals, copper, and lithium [18–27].
industry [13]. The ITO recycling capacity in Japan Ionic liquids as “green solvents” in green chemistry
 Li-pan JIA, et al/Trans. Nonferrous Met. Soc. China 30(2020) 3147−3160 3151
show great potential in the separation processes. It extraction, biohydrometallurgy, electrohydro-
has the potential to solve the problems caused metallurgy, ion exchange, precipitation, adsorption,
by traditional solvent extraction such as Na+- or and cementation. The relative proportion of each
NH4+-containing wastewater, lower separation period is shown in Fig. 3. There are two obvious
factor, and complicated process. changes. First, the proportion of solvent extraction
To sum up, the research hotspots can be research has decreased from 31% in the early stage
roughly divided into two categories. One is ionic to 19% in recent ten years. Taking the increase of
liquids and biosorption, which is brought about by the total articles as shown in Fig. 1 into account, the
environmental protection requirements. The other is number of articles related to solvent extraction is
uranium, lithium, rare earth, indium, and so on, increased steadily. Second, the proportion of
which is due to the imbalance between supply and biohydrometallurgy has increased from 5% in the
demand. Through the above analysis, we can early stage to 13% recently. The proportion
conclude that the drastic price changes in the metal decrease of solvent extraction is due to the
market could affect the direction of academic early upsurge of solvent extraction research and the
research. And the output of academic achievements
usually takes two years or more, so it is very
important to find out the metals which are sensitive
to the international market and to make technology
reserves in advance to ensure the healthy operation
of the economy. The EU, the US, and Australia all
have a list of key materials calculated based on
supply risk and economic importance. Figure 2
shows the critical raw materials (CRMs) of Europe
in 2017, which did not change much compared with
previous years [28,29]. To some extent, it applies to
most countries and represents global trends. As
shown in Fig. 2, the closer the metal is to the upper
right like rare earth, magnesium, and antimony, the
more indispensable it is, the greater the risk of Fig. 2 Critical raw materials (gray area) according to
supply, the more volatile its price is, and it is easier report of European Commission in 2017 [29]
to become a future research hotspot, which should
be paid more attention. With the increase of the
exploitation cost of traditional mineral resources
and the gradual increase of the scale of urban mines,
the study of resource recycling will gradually
become the mainstream.

3.2 Content analysis

In the last section, the hot spots of
hydrometallurgy in different periods since 1975 are
excavated and the causes are discussed. In this
section, the main contents of hydrometallurgy
are analyzed, and the main plates (leaching,
solvent extraction, biohydrometallurgy, electro-
hydrometallurgy) are analyzed in detail by the
methods of reference co-citation, clustering and
keywords co-occurrence.
Based on the text mining of topics and term
frequency, it can be concluded that the contents of Fig. 3 Relative proportion change of content (1975−2019)
Hydrometallurgy mainly include leaching, solvent of Hydrometallurgy
3152 Li-pan JIA, et al/Trans. Nonferrous Met. Soc. China 30(2020) 3147−3160
diversification of researches nowadays. While the is the most important approach for bibliometrics,
proportion increase of biohydrometallurgy is which can reflect the framework and evolution of
attributed to the more and more attention paid to knowledge. References co-citation network and the
biohydrometallurgy from the academic community cluster of leaching and electro-hydrometallurgy are
for its cleaner and lower-cost process (especially given as shown in Figs. 4 and 5, respectively. The
for low-grade sulfide ore), regularly holding of figures contain three elements: points, lines, and
International Biohydrometallurgy Symposium and frames. Points represent references, links indicate
the occasional publication of special issues. that they are cited by the same article, and if the
Next, we try to catch the main contents of the articles have similar topics they are clustered into a
major plates (leaching, solvent extraction, black frame. The clusters are sorted by the number
biohydrometallurgy, electro-hydrometallurgy) by of nodes in each cluster.
reference and keywords analysis. Reference analysis For leaching, the references cited most

Fig. 4 Co-citation network and cluster of leaching related references (Timespan: 1998−2019, slice length=2, g-index=6,
LRF=−1, LBY=−1, e=2, N=171, E=355)

Fig. 5 Co-citation network and cluster of electrochemistry related references (Timespan: 1998−2019, slice length=2,
c/cc/ccv:2/2/20, LRF=−1, LBY=−1, e=2, N=286, E=1637)
 Li-pan JIA, et al/Trans. Nonferrous Met. Soc. China 30(2020) 3147−3160 3153

frequently are about laterite nickel ore, gold and electrochemical oxidation of chalcopyrite, and
silver, copper ore (mainly chalcopyrite), and zinc electrochemical properties of chalcopyrite, pyrite,
ore. Words frequency statistics shows that the most gold-bearing minerals, and their leaching solution.
frequent elements are iron (124 articles), copper In addition, there are many studies on lead-based
(120 articles), gold (82 articles), zinc (80 articles), electrodes for electro-winning. In recent years,
silver (56 articles), and nickel (56 articles), and the recovering valuable metals such as copper, gold,
most frequent mineral is chalcopyrite. To sum up, and zinc from waste printed circuit boards and
precious metals and base metals including copper, waste batteries by electro-assisted leaching and/or
nickel, and zinc are the main research objects electrodeposition in a single-cell process has been a
for leaching. Manganese ore, ilmenite, lithium, research hotspot as shown in Fig. 5 (#5) [31−33].
mechanical activation, and microwave-assisted The reference clustering results of solvent
leaching also appear in the cluster. We notice that extraction and biohydrometallurgy are bad, from
X-ray tomography is an emerging method to study which we cannot draw any useful conclusions. So,
the mechanism of heap leaching (Detailed the co-occurrence analysis of keywords was made
discussion in instrument analysis below). Keywords as shown in Figs. 6 and 7. The high-frequency
Kinetics occurs up to 176 times in leaching. keywords for solvent extraction include D2EHPA,
Compared with the pyrometallurgy, the biggest nickel, zinc, cobalt, copper, stripping, cyanex272,
difficulty of hydrometallurgy is that the leaching cyanex923, TBP, and rare earth. As it is, although
reaction rate is lower due to the relatively low there are hundreds of extractants, the most studied
operating temperature. Therefore, the key direction extractants are D2EHPA, cyanex series, and TBP.
is kinetics research and leaching strengthening. And Other separation technologies related to solvent
the most frequent reference about kinetics is the extraction include ionic liquids (ILs), emulsion
famous book Chemical Reaction Engineering [30]. liquid membrane (ELM), and supported liquid
For electro-hydrometallurgy related articles, membrane (SLM). Ionic liquids and rare earth
the cited reference groups are mainly about the coexist frequently as shown in Fig. 6. About
electrochemical research of zinc electrowinning, one-third of the articles on ionic liquids are about

Fig. 6 Co-occurrence network of solvent extraction related keywords (Timespan: 1998−2019, slice length=2, g-index=8,
LRF=−1, LBY=−1, e=2, N=130, E=183)
3154 Li-pan JIA, et al/Trans. Nonferrous Met. Soc. China 30(2020) 3147−3160

Fig. 8 Schematic diagrams of supported liquid

membrane (a) and emulsion liquid membrane (b)
Fig. 7 Co-occurrence network of biohydrometallurgy
related keywords (Timespan: 1998−2019, slice length=2, used are Thiobacillus ferrooxidans. Biosorption and
g-index=8, LRF=−1, LBY=−1, e=2, N=137, E=175) heavy metals have high co-occurrence. It is mainly
about biomass adsorbed and removed heavy
rare earth extraction. Compared with traditional metals from solution, classified as bioremediation.
volatile organic solvents, ionic liquids have many Bacteria commonly used in biometallurgy include
obvious advantages. First of all, it is known that Thiobacillus ferrooxidans, Sulfolobus metallicus,
the number of ILs is far more than that of Leptospirillum ferriphilum, Thiobacillus thio-
conventional organic solvents, which can be as high oxidans, and Thiobacillus thermophilus. Among
as 1018. So, it is obvious that ILs provide us more them, Thiobacillus ferrooxidans is one of the most
choices. What’s more, the distinctive properties important and widely used bacteria in the
such as viscosity, conductivity, hydrophilicity, bioleaching process. And the modern era of
hydrophobicity, polarity, and hydrogen bond bioleaching began with the discovery of the
ability are extraordinarily tunable, relying on the bacterium, Thiobacillus ferrooxidans (now
selection of appropriate anion and cation [34]. Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans) in the mid-1940s
So, there is a promising future for ILs in and in 1958 Kennecott Mining Company patented
hydrometallurgy [35−37]. The liquid membrane the use of Thiobacillus ferrooxidans for copper
separation, including support liquid membrane and extraction [38]. Through cooperation of CSU
non-support liquid membrane (mainly ELM), is an (China) with TIGR (USA), the sequence
improved technology in the use of the solvent information of 3217 genes of the bacteria
extractant by making the extraction and stripping Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidance was revealed in
run simultaneously which removes the balance limit 2004 [39]. In 2007, functional gene arrays (FGAs)
of the reaction. Figure 8 shows schematic diagrams method was first used in biohydrometallurgy, which
of the two types of liquid membrane. In Fig. 8(a), if can detect and analyze the population structure,
the SLM is replaced by ionic liquids, it can be community dynamics and functional activity of
called a supported ionic liquid membrane (SILM). microorganism in biomining in a rapid, accurate
Biohydrometallurgy mainly includes bio- and high-throughput manner [40]. This technology
leaching, bioremediation, and bio-beneficiation. It realized the fundamental transformation from
can be seen from the keywords co-occurrence phenotype to genotype in the screening of high-
network (Fig. 7) that bioleaching accounts for the efficiency bacterial strains.
overwhelming majority. It can be seen from the In addition to the above contents, there are
co-occurrence relationship that bioleaching mainly many new research directions in hydrometallurgy
deals with chalcopyrite, and the bacteria mainly such as direct preparation of materials in
 Li-pan JIA, et al/Trans. Nonferrous Met. Soc. China 30(2020) 3147−3160 3155
hydrometallurgical processes, and ion-imprinted be of great application in the adsorption,
polymer technology. enrichment, and deep separation of elements.
As far as we know, direct preparation of
materials during the hydrometallurgy process is a
promising direction, and there are some articles
published in the Hydrometallurgy. The basic idea is
that in the hydrometallurgy process, we can
selectively purify the leaching solution and prepare
materials directly. For example, MENG et al [41]
purified the leaching solution of nickel−copper
sulfide ore, regulated the ratio of the elements in the
solution, and added some cobalt and manganese
salts, and then precipitated the precursor
Ni0.8Co0.1Mn0.1OH8, and finally calcined together Fig. 9 Schematic diagram of synthesis mechanism of
with lithium hydroxide to prepare cathode material metal ion-imprinted polymer
LiNi0.8Co0.1Mn0.1O2. WU et al [42] directly prepared
TiO2 nanowires using rutile. As it is, direct 3.3 Elements
preparation of materials in the hydrometallurgy The content analysis of the previous section
process can avoid unnecessary steps, such as mainly reflects the general contents of each plate of
preparing pure metal, which can shorten the total hydrometallurgy. In this section, we have retrieved
process and save the cost. With the focus of and analyzed the main elements involved in
metallurgical research gradually shifting from hydrometallurgy. The elements with more than
traditional minerals to urban mines, it is more 10 articles are shown in Table 2. The most studied
reasonable to decompose and re-prepare materials elements are copper, iron, zinc, nickel, and gold. As
directly for many cases, such as prepare cathode we all know, there are so many researches on base
materials in the process of recycling lithium-ion metals, for their demands and consumptions are
batteries [43–47]. large, and gold also occupies a large proportion in
From 2007 to 2019, there are nine articles hydrometallurgy for its scarcity and high
about ion-imprinted polymer technology in preservation ability. For iron, the related researches
Hydrometallurgy. Ion-imprinted polymers are are mainly focused on iron removal by precipitation,
mainly used for ion sensors and selective adsorption solvent extraction and separation of iron, and
and separation of metal ions. For ion sensors, rare iron−sulfur oxidizing bacteria leaching.
earth ions can be quantitatively identified by cyclic Of base metals, articles on aluminum are
voltammetry based on an ion-imprinted polymer- relatively few, for the Bayer process for aluminum
modified electrode. This ion-imprinted material is is relatively mature and stable. For copper, the
prepared by a covalent combination of polyamine research is mainly on bioleaching of chalcopyrite,
ligands and bentonite [48]. For adsorption and oxygen pressure leaching, and chlorination leaching,
separation, many studies have shown high followed by electrochemistry of copper sulfide
separation coefficients [49,50]. The synthesis leaching, electrochemical oxidation leaching, and
approach of ion-imprinted polymers is shown in the catalytic action of silver ions in the leaching
Fig. 9. The screening of functional monomers is the process. The researches of zinc mainly include
core of obtaining excellent separation materials. alkali leaching of oxide ore, bioleaching of sulfide
Chitosan and silica gel are usually used as polymer ore, iron removal of the lixivium, recovery of
matrixes. Ion-imprinted material always has high associated indium from zinc ferrate and sphalerite,
selectivity. For example, the separation of La3+, zinc leaching from zinc silicate, zinc electro-
Ce3+, and Pr3+ ions can be realized at the picometre deposition, zinc cementation, and zinc recovery
scale by using the ion surface-imprinted polymer from spent dry cells containing zinc. The main
material [51]. However, the adsorption capacity is researches of nickel include oxygen pressure acid
always lower, which may be overcome by the leaching, oxidation leaching, bioleaching leaching
ion-imprinted membrane [49]. This technique may solution purification of laterite nickel ore, solvent
3156 Li-pan JIA, et al/Trans. Nonferrous Met. Soc. China 30(2020) 3147−3160

Table 2 Number of articles on the most studied elements

Number of Precious Number of Number Number of
Base metal Rare metal Others
articles metal articles of articles articles
Al 234 Ag 207 REES 253 As 116
Cu 921 Au 366 Nb,Ta 30 Cd 83
Pb 183 Pt 64 V,Ti 240 Cr 52
Zn 529 Pd 66 W,Mo,Rh 178 Mg 86
Co 222 Zr,Hf 40 Sb 57
Ni 393 Li 104 Fe 634
U,Th 195 Mn 210
In,Ga 71

extraction and separation of copper, cobalt, and ZHANG, et al. The researches on indium are mainly
nickel, recovery of valuable metals from spent attributed to Xing-bin LI and Wei CHANG from
Ni−Cd Ni−MH battery, and bioleaching of nickel Kunming University of Science and Technology. In
sulfide ore. addition, zirconium and hafnium, R. K. BISWAS
The most frequent co-occurrence keywords of from Rajshahi University, and Man Seung LEE
gold are cyanidation, passivation, silver, thiosulfate, from Mokpo National University; tantalum and
copper, and thiourea. The main contents include niobium, Shi-li ZHENG from Chinese Academy of
thiosulfate leaching of gold-bearing minerals and Sciences.
secondary resources and ion exchange extraction of
gold from the leaching solution, electrochemical 3.4 Instrument analysis
dissolution of gold-bearing minerals, cyanidation Advanced instrumental analysis can provide
process and passivation, thiourea leaching, and powerful support for the study of hydrometallurgy
bacterial oxidation leaching. mechanism. Besides the most commonly used
The high-frequency co-occurrence words of XRD, SEM, EDS/EDX, IR, XPS, CV (cyclic
rare earth include solvent extraction, lanthanum, voltammetry) and NMR, other methods including
neodymium, and yttrium. The main researches Raman, TEM, Mossbauer, XAFS (X-ray absorption
include solvent extraction, recovering rare earth fine structure), gene sequencing, and CT (computed
from secondary resources such as waste fluorescent tomography, the most frequently used is X-ray
powder and spent catalyst, and extracting rare earth computed tomography) are also used in
by ionic liquids. hydrometallurgy. Among them, XAFS, gene
The researches of some other rare metals sequencing, and CT appeared late (in 2005, 2001,
center on a few institutes, and show a resource and 2013, respectively). Based on XAFS (including
location relevance to some extent, for the resources XANES and EXAFS), we can analyze the element
are always concentrated and scarce, the scale of species and coordination of complexes, and
production is small, and there is no need to invest furthermore, to reveal the reaction mechanism.
too much research force. For example, the Gene sequencing, usually based on the PCR
researches on vanadium are mainly attributed to Yi amplification and denaturing gradient gel
ZHANG, from Chinese Academy of Sciences, about electrophoresis (DGGE) and sequencing of 16S
the extraction of vanadium from coal gangue and rRNA gene fragments, is used to analyze the
vanadium titanomagnetite. Titanium extraction is microbial community inhabiting which is a key
attributed to Chun LI, from Sichuan University, issue to improve commercial applications of the
China, mainly about the extraction of titanium from microbes. The institutes using this instrument
Panzhihua ilmenite. The researches on tungsten and include Imperial College (micro-CT, micro means
molybdenum mainly concentrate in Central South that the pixel sizes of the cross-sections are in the
University, China, the contributors include micrometer range), the Melbourne University, the
Zhong-wei ZHAO, Xing-yu CHEN, Gui-qing French National Scientific Research Centre, the
 Li-pan JIA, et al/Trans. Nonferrous Met. Soc. China 30(2020) 3147−3160 3157
University of Stellenbosch, University of South
Australia, and so on. CT is a non-destructive 3D
imaging technique that permits visualization of the
internal structure within the sample. As we all know,
the traditional kinetics usually takes a single
particle as the research object. With the help of CT,
the reaction mechanism of the packing particles can
be clearly understood. The large-scale reaction
kinetics of heap or column leaching can be studied,
and the kinetic model obtained is closer to the truth.
For heap leaching, micro-CT has been used to track
the extent of leaching within ore particles, and
morphological parameters such as the size and
shape of particles and the distribution of the mineral Fig. 10 Cooperation network and article ring diagram of
grains within them [52]. For fast imaging, dynamic main institutes (Timespan: 1998−2019, slice length=2,
process imaging, or high-resolution imaging, X-ray g-index=5, LRF=−1, LBY=−1, e=2, N=144, E=88,
based on synchrotron is needed [53]. On a larger pruning: pathfinder)
scale, the leaching mechanism of the in-situ
leaching process can be analyzed by electrical
resistance tomography [54]. However, instruments
like CT and XAFS are very scarce and expensive.
Strengthening cooperation across institutes is
necessary for related researches.

3.5 The most influential institutes and authors

Before 1997, the Internet was not popularized,
which may be a reason for the lacking of
cooperation across institutes worldwide. Further-
more, the format of the articles at that time was not
standardized, resulting in a large number of data
missing. So, the map only from 1998 to 2019 is Fig. 11 Paper influence of top 17 most productive
drawn, as shown in Fig. 10. The purple outer ring authors (1975−2019, the radius of a circle represents the
indicates that the organization is more inclined to H-index)
cooperate with other institutes. The lines show the
cooperation and the color of a line shows the time productive author is F. J. ALGUACIL from Spanish
of the first cooperation. The top 10 productive National Research Council. His H-index is far
institutes are Central South University, Chinese ahead and the total cited times is second to
Academy of Sciences, Murdoch University, F. VEGLIO. The main research directions are
University of British Columbia, Commonwealth solvent extraction and membrane separation. The
Scientific and Industrial Research Organization second is Yi ZHANG from Chinese Academy of
(CSIRO), Korean Institute of Geosciences and Sciences, and the main research area includes
Mineral Resources (KIGAM), India Centre of leaching, and impurity removal of vanadium,
Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), titanium and aluminum, and so on. The main
Kunming University of Science and Technology, directions of Zhong-wei ZHAO from Central South
India Bhabha Atomic Research Center, and the University are tungsten and molybdenum extraction
University of Cape Town, respectively. and lithium extraction from a saline lake. R. P. DAS
Figure 11 shows the influence of the 17 most from CSIR is mainly engaged in the research of
productive authors sorted by the number of articles. value metals extraction from manganese nodules
This paper only makes a brief analysis of the first and the extraction of cobalt, nickel, and zinc. Many
five productive or influential authors. The most of his articles are about the leaching mechanism
3158 Li-pan JIA, et al/Trans. Nonferrous Met. Soc. China 30(2020) 3147−3160
of copper, gold, nickel, manganese, and so on. As it is, the development of hydrometallurgy
Specifically, F. VEGLIO from the University of will gradually enter a new stage. There will be
Aquila in Italy has the highest total cited times with more and more researches on secondary resources.
22 articles, which have been up to 1624 times. The The new instrument analysis methods will
main research direction is bio-adsorption. gradually apply to the deep exploration
of the hydrometallurgical mechanism. With the
4 Conclusions fast-growing resources demands for the lasting
economic development and the increasingly serious
(1) The current hot topics in hydrometallurgy environmental challenges, developing countries like
are rare earth, recycling, lithium, ionic liquids, and China and India will conduct more and more
thorium. The emergence of these topics can be researches on hydrometallurgy, and make more
attributed to the market changes, technological contributions to hydrometallurgy.
progress, and environmental protection. We can
draw a conclusion based on the hotspots analysis of References
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湿法冶金研究趋势：基于 1975—2019 年
《Hydrometallurgy》文献的综述
贾利攀 1，黄江江 1，马泽龙 1，刘旭恒 1，陈星宇 1，李江涛 1，何利华 1，赵中伟 1,2

1. 中南大学 冶金与环境学院，长沙 410083；

2. 稀有金属冶金与材料制备湖南省重点实验室，长沙 410083

摘 要：当代湿法冶金已发展一百多年，相关领域的论文越来越多。
《Hydrometallurgy》是湿法冶金领域最有代表
性的期刊，基于对该期刊的文献计量分析，从全局角度获得湿法冶金的研究发展趋势。首先，关键词突发性筛查
结果显示，稀土、回收循环、锂、离子液体和钍是近些年的研发热点，对这些热点的经济和技术背景进行探讨。
其次，生物冶金文献的比例从早期的 5%快速增长到近些年的 13%，且相关论文主要是生物浸出。在湿法冶金过
程中直接制备材料和离子印迹技术是近些年出现的新技术。第三，新出现的仪器分析方法如 X 射线吸收精细结构
谱、基因测序和高分辨断层扫描能促进人们对湿法冶金机理的深入理解。最后，绘制并分析世界主要研究机构的
合作图谱。
关键词：发展趋势；浸出；溶剂萃取；生物冶金；电化学湿法冶金；CiteSpace
(Edited by Wei-ping CHEN)