Patent 7163570 was granted and assigned to Anglo American Platinum on January, 2007 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A chromatographic separation method separates ruthenium from other platinum group metals in a feed solution, by converting the Ru to a nitrosyl complex, retaining the nitrosyl complex temporarily on the chromatography column and subsequently eluting Ru, for example using an oxidising or reducing eluent. FIG. 1 shows the elution profile obtained from a mixture of Rh chloro-complexes (Peak 1) and Ru nitrosyl species (Peak 2).