High-performance critical-element-free permanent magnets CMI research at Ames Laboratory demonstrated that mechanochemical preprocessing is beneficial for nitrogen insertion/topotactic extraction
Lower-cost commercial grade Ce enhances performance and reduces cost in gap magnets CMI research with lower-cost commercial grade cerium enhances performance and reduces cost in gap magnets. Also, the less costly “dirty” cerium samples showed as much as a 5% increase of both coercivity and magnetization, resulting in better energy product.
CMI research on cover of journal: Sustainable urban mining of critical elements from magnet and electronic wastes Journal publication on the acid-free leaching process for recycling rare-earth elements and cobalt from waste magnet and e-waste materials is published and highlighted as a supplementary cover in ACS high impact journal
Optimized shredding conditions enables improvement in leaching time for REEs in end-of-life hard disk drives (HDDs) A HDD shredder designed to result in optimally shredded feedstock for acid-free dissolution and also minimize the amount of magnets attached to the cutters during shredding has been commissioned. Consequently, only ~60% of the original leaching time is required and a dissolution efficiency of ≥72% wt.% was obtained for HDDs.
Mines graduate research in biogeochemistry Olivia Salmon earned master of science degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Mines, December 2020. Thesis: “Impacts of Rare Earth Elements on Biological Wastewater Treatment Processes”
Chinese policies toward rare earths, 1975-2018 Review of original Chinese documents, along with contemporaneous assessments of global rare earth markets and overall Chinese industrial policies
Optimizing the economic performance of CMI technologies Paper “Applying Design of Experiments to Evaluate Market Opportunity for Bioleaching Rare-Earth Elements from Waste Materials” for CIRP Life Cycle Engineering Conference
Electrochemical leaching of cobalt and lithium from nickel-rich battery sources To recycle batteries, CMI created a way that consumes electricity instead of chemicals to transform crushed batteries to a concentrated mixture well suited to separation into materials for new batteries. This method is flexible, and efficient. It can be used with different types of batteries, and pulls out more than 97 percent of the lithium, cobalt, copper, manganese, iron and nickel.
Discovery of the large coercivity CeCo5 – CeZn5 system CMI researchers discover the large coercivity CeCo5 – CeZn5 system
Development of a new rare earth-free permanent magnet based on Sb-doped Fe3Sn CMI research on development of a new rare earth-free permanent magnet based on Sb-doped Fe3Sn
