The extraction behavior is primarily affected by the formation of
intermetallic compounds, and thus a thorough knowledge on the
existence and stability of intermetallic compounds in the various
binary phase diagrams RE-Me are important. Moreover, thermodynamic
properties such as the stability of the intermetallic compounds
are of high interest, both for a thermodynamic assessment of the
binary system based on the CALPHAD1 method [4], but also for an
optimization of the extraction process itself.