Chemists from the city of Krasnoyarsk in eastern Siberia have managed to extract tiny magnetic particles known as "ferrospheres" from the ash of thermal power plants.
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These particles may prove useful in the future in the field of biomedicine. The results of the study, conducted by scientists from the Institute of Chemical Chemistry and Chemical Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, were published in the journal "Magnetochemistry".
It is worth noting that coal ash produced from combustion in thermal power plants accumulates in enormous quantities, with an annual volume in Russia ranging between 18 and 26 million tons, of which only 10–20% is recycled. This ash contains ferrophores, but their extraction is difficult due to their extremely small particle size.
One possible solution to this problem is to enhance the extraction of valuable materials from ash. Ash contains iron-rich, microscopic magnetic particles known as ferrospheres, which are promising for the development of drugs and biosensors. They can also be used in magnetotherapy, a treatment that uses a magnetic field to heat and destroy cancer cells. However, extracting these particles from ash remains a challenging task due to their extremely small size.
The chemists proposed addressing the problem in two stages. In the first stage, the ash is divided into parts ranging in size from 3 to 25 micrometers, with the removal of particles smaller than a micron, which hinder the magnetic separation process.
In the second stage, the ferrophores are extracted from the resulting mass using dry magnetic separation, allowing for the production of precise magnetic and non-magnetic particles of specific sizes.
The results showed that the magnetic response of the extracted particles was more than ten times greater than that of the original material.
This method is characterized by its low cost, as it does not require the use of liquids, and therefore does not require filtration and drying processes.
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