Project Team
Principal Researchers
Long Qi Ames Laboratory leads the CMI project "Transformative rare earth recovery with Al-accelerated ligand synthesis and separation"
This project will enable automation and optimization of the RD&D lifecycle of rare-earth separation to reduce costs at the lab scale and provide information for sustainable processes. To achieve this, we will employ an automated synthesis system that allows for algorithm-guided synthesis optimization of organic extractants developed by CMI. The automated synthesis process will reduce the time of optimization from weeks to days and the optimized conditions will be transferred to industrial partners to inform the scale up process. We will also develop a high-throughput system for the evaluation of ligand extraction and recovery with methods developed to assess the large dataset.