Effects of process history on the surface morphology of uranium ore concentrates extracted from ore

The effects of process history on the particle morphology of uranium ore concentrates (UOC) synthesized from natural uranium ores were investigated. A purified UOC was extracted from a uranium-rich ore by sulfuric acid leaching and purified by two commercial solvent extraction processes: the Dapex process using di-(2-ethylhexyl) phosphoric acid (DEHPA), and the Amex process using Alamine® 336. The UOC from either route was precipitated from its respective strip solution by ammonia and calcined. Powder X-ray diffraction (P-XRD) was used to confirm the crystallography of the UOC; while Rietveld refinement was performed for quantification of U oxide phase composition. Inductively coupled plasma - mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) was used to quantify impurity concentrations of the calcined material. As expected, different impurities were present due to processing via the Dapex and Amex process. To further correlate the impurities to the process history, particle morphology was quantified from scanning electron microscopy (SEM) micrographs using the MAMA segmentation software. In addition, a deep neural network was trained on the SEM images to distinguish between process histories. The results provide a real-world representation of how particle morphology will likely change based on processing at commercial facilities as opposed to high purity material experiments in a laboratory setting.