Selective recovery of indium from the etching waste solution of the flat-panel display fabrication process

The waste byproducts from the indium-consuming fabrication processes are considered as the viable resource for indium due to the unique preference to the element in designing optoelectronic devices. The present work introduces a new technique for the selective recovery of indium from the etching waste, which produced during the patterning of indium tin oxide (ITO) layer on the flat-panel displays. The process includes the application of a solid phase extraction (SPE) assembly, known as molecular recognition technology (MRT) gel, consisting of a metal-selective ligand immobilized to silica gel or polymer substrates. The samples were the real solution of etching waste from the liquid-crystal display fabrication process, and the simulated waste solution prepared using the commercially available etching solution composition containing…