Advanced chelators offer efficient and eco-friendly rare earth element recovery

New method is an order of magnitude more efficient than the industry standard

13-Aug-2024 - The world is going to need a lot of weird metals in the coming years, according to chemistry professor Justin Wilson at UC Santa Barbara. But he isn’t talking about lithium, cobalt or even beryllium. Wilson’s interested in dysprosium, which is so hidden in the periodic table that you’d be ...

Revolutionizing lithium production on a string

Launch of a startup

25-Sep-2023 - A vital component of the batteries at the heart of electric vehicles and grid energy storage, lithium is key to a clean energy future. But producing the silvery-white metal comes with significant environmental costs. Among them is the vast amount of land and time needed to extract lithium from ...

New way to pull lithium from water could increase supply, efficiency

Just a single week’s worth of water from hydraulic fracturing in Texas’ Eagle Ford Shale has the potential to produce enough lithium for 300 electric vehicle batteries or 1.7 million smartphones

14-Sep-2021 - Anyone using a cellphone, laptop or electric vehicle depends on lithium. The element is in tremendous demand. And although the supply of lithium around the world is plentiful, getting access to it and extracting it remains a challenging and inefficient process. An interdisciplinary team of ...

Heavy-petroleum fuels raising vanadium emissions

19-Dec-2017 - Human emissions of the potentially harmful trace metal vanadium into Earth's atmosphere have spiked sharply since the start of the 21st century due in large part to industry's growing use of heavy oils, tar sands, bitumen and petroleum coke for energy, a new Duke University study finds. "Human ...

Scientists discover 'supramolecule' that could help reduce nuclear, agricultural waste

10-Oct-2016 - Indiana University researchers have reported the first definitive evidence for a new molecular structure with potential applications to the safe storage of nuclear waste and reduction of chemicals that contaminate water and trigger large fish kills. The study provides experimental proof for the ...

ORNL licenses rare earth magnet recycling process to Momentum Technologies

06-Sep-2016 - The Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Momentum Technologies have signed a non-exclusive licensing agreement for an ORNL process designed to recover rare earth magnets from used computer hard drives. The patent-pending process developed as part of DOE's Critical Materials ...

New CMI process recycles valuable rare earth metals from old electronics

03-Mar-2015 - Scientists at the Critical Materials Institute have developed a two-step recovery process that makes recycling rare-earth metals easier and more cost-effective. Rare-earth metals are valuable ingredients in a variety of modern technologies and are found in cell phones, hard disk drives in ...

Rice lab clocks ‘hot’ electrons

Researchers time plasmon-generated electrons moving from nanorods to graphene

03-Feb-2014 - Plasmonic nanoparticles developed at Rice University are becoming known for their ability to turn light into heat, but how to use them to generate electricity is not nearly as well understood. Scientists at Rice are working on that, too. They suggest that the extraction of electrons generated by ...

Beyond peer review: manage errors in research data

19-Sep-2013 - Traditional peer review is not enough to ensure data quality amid the recent boom in scientific research findings, according to results of a 10-year collaboration between the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and five technical journals. While production of research data is ...

Studying bacterial metabolites with mass spectrometry

19-Feb-2013 - Organic compounds produced by colonies of bacteria can now be characterised using a mass-spectrometry technique that is both location specific and non-destructive. The method enables the rapid identification of metabolites from specific areas of an agar gel without affecting the viability of the ...