Abstract: A method to purify industrial yellow phosphorus by nitric acid oxidation combined with zone melting was developed in this work.The effects of reaction time and mass fraction of nitric acid on arsenic removal rate and phosphorus recovery rate were investigated.Results showed that the mass fraction of arsenic in yellow phosphorus could be decreased to less than 1×10-6 and the phosphorus recovery rate was up to 80.0% when the experiments were carried out under the following conditions: mass fraction of nitric acid was 13%，volume ratio of liquid to solid was 7∶1，amount of the new oxidation enhancer accounted for 5%（mass fraction）of yellow phosphorus，reaction temperature was 75 ℃ and reaction time was 4 h.In order to further remove metal impurities，zone melting method was used to refine yellow phosphorus after the processing of oxidation. The removal rates of Ca，Fe，and Mg reached 97.67%，98.15%，and 85.29%，respectively.The method of nitric acid oxidation combined with zone melting could purify industrial yellow phosphorus effectively and improve the production of high purity yellow phosphorus.

Key words: yellow phosphorus, nitric acid oxidation, arsenic removal, zone melting, metal impurity