Geo-inspired Separation of Rare-earth Elements

Rare earth elements (REEs) are essential to the economic growth and national security of the United States, and the supply chain of these critical minerals becomes increasingly vulnerable to disruptions. To effectively exploit secondary sources of REEs, we must learn about the localized environment of REEs in these sources and enable enhanced recovery and separation approaches optimized across a variety of REEs and sources. Our geoinspired REEs separation project addresses the growing need to explore new approaches to critical materials recovery and separation and investigates the processes in natural clays at fundamental level.

The goal of this project is to gain basic understanding of rare earth elements speciation, spatio-chemical environment, and mechanism of adsorption in selected natural ion-adsorption clays and their synthetic analogs. This deep knowledge will underpin future developments in REEs separation and recovery from diverse underutilized secondary sources.  Our research is aligned with the Goal of Separation Science Program of enabling chemical separation paradigms that may become the basis for solutions to the current and long-term energy challenges.

Our integrated approach combines cutting-edge synthesis, analytical Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy, advanced solid-state NMR spectroscopy, and synchrotron-based analyses, to gain fundamental understanding of interactions between REEs and natural clays. We utilize the beamlines at the APS, Argonne National Laboratory. We leverage the Ames Lab expertise in theory, rare earths, and separation sciences.

This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Chemical Sciences, Geosciences, and Biosciences Division, Separation Science program. Ames National Laboratory is operated for the U.S. Department of Energy by Iowa State University under Contract No. DEAC02-07CH11358.

Principal Investigator: Tanya Prozorov

Co-PIs (Ames Laboratory): Jared Anderson, Fred Perras, Julia Zaikina