US Patent Issued to The University of Toledo on Feb. 3 for "Environmentally friendly polymeric sorbent material for the extraction and determination of rare earth elements, thorium, and uranium" (Ohio Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 3 -- United States Patent no. 12,539,503, issued on Feb. 3, was assigned to The University of Toledo (Toledo, Ohio).

"Environmentally friendly polymeric sorbent material for the extraction and determination of rare earth elements, thorium, and uranium" was invented by Jon R. Kirchhoff (Toledo, Ohio), Sandhya Adhikari (Toledo, Ohio) and Govind Sharma Shyam Sunder (Toledo, Ohio).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method for extracting a metal species from a solution is described, where the metal species comprises a rare earth element, Th, or U. The method involves the use of poly(caffeic acid) as a sorbent material. The poly(caffeic acid) may be crosslinked with a diamine cro...