Research advances on valuable metals recovery from spent hydrogenation catalyst

The increasing demand for hydrogenation catalysts in the petrochemical industry has led to the increasing amount of scrapped hydrogenation catalysts during these years. The spent hydrogenation catalysts contain a lot of valuable metals, and its cyclic utilization is significant for environmental protection and efficient utilization of resources. Domestic and foreign scholars have carried out a lot of research on the recovery of spent hydrogenation catalysts, and the processes that have been developed are mainly divided into three categories: hydrometallurgical process, pyrometallurgical process and pyro-hydrometallurgical combined process. This paper reviews the research progresses of recycling spent hydrogenation catalysts in recent years, and focuses on the main procedures, principles, advantages and disadvantages of different technologies. In view of the shortcomings of traditional recycling technology, reduction smelting is proposed to enrich valuable metals from spent hydrogenation catalysts, and then hydrometallurgical process is used to recover multi-metal alloy. Finally, the development trend and prospect for the recovery of spent hydrogenation catalyst are discussed.