SBIR Phase I: Clean Iron and Nickel Powder Production for Steel Construction on the Meridiani Planum of Mars and Cathode Manufacture for Lithium-Ion Batteries on Earth

SBIR 第一阶段：火星子午线平原钢结构清洁铁镍粉生产和地球锂离子电池阴极制造

• 批准号: 2233554
• 负责人: Rolf Olsen
• 金额: $ 27.5万
• 依托单位: TPL LLC
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-08-01 至 2024-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2233554&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SBIR; Phase; Clean; Iron; Nickel

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is a technology to explore the utility in the ubiquity of iron on both Earth and Mars. The ores of many metals are iron-rich, mixed materials, including those of 33+ metals critical for a sustainable future. However, high iron content is a nuisance for most established metal extractions. For example, iron, rare earth elements, and unextracted aluminum remain in the vast tailing ponds generated by aluminum feed processing. This project develops a better method for processing many mixed-material industrial wastes and ores. The method is called fast iron carbonylation and is expected to lower the cost of iron and nickel powders, add value by making better concentrates of rare earth elements and many other energy metals, and clean up metal processing and waste sites. This process will inexpensively and profitably produce metal feeds for battery manufacturing and enable the benefits of clean electric transport. The fast iron carbonylation-based steel-making hardware is rugged, simple-to-operate, and light weight. This SBIR Phase I project develops and tests a reactor to carry out fast iron carbonylation. Iron and nickel carbonylation are reversible, exothermic gas/solid reactions. Carbonylation in state-of-the-art, industrial-scale reactors is significantly impeded such that, at large scales, achieving high per-unit volume reaction rates is challenging. The proposed fast iron carbonylation reactor seeks to drive the reversible reactions far from equilibrium to achieve net carbonyl production at least 10 times faster than state-of-the-art carbonylation. The project will run tests on relevant mixed-material metal ores and industrial wastes at scales much larger than are typical for benchtop experiments (~5 kg samples). These tests aim to extract close to 100% of the iron and nickel in the test samples and produce residues that can be readily processed to produce high value concentrates of rare earth elements and other critical metals.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

这项小型企业创新研究（SBIR）I阶段项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是探索地球和火星铁无处不在的效用的技术。许多金属的矿石是铁富集的混合材料，包括33多种金属的矿石，对可持续的未来至关重要。但是，高铁含量是大多数已建立的金属提取物的滋扰。例如，铁，稀土元素和未提取的铝保留在铝饲料加工产生的巨大尾部池塘中。该项目开发了一种更好地处理许多混合物质工业废物和矿石的方法。该方法称为快速铁羰基化，预计将降低铁和镍粉的成本，通过使稀土元素和许多其他能源金属的浓度更好，并清理金属加工和废物位点，从而增加价值。这个过程将廉价和有利可图地生产用于电池制造的金属饲料，并使清洁电动运输的好处。基于快速的铁羰基化钢制成硬件是坚固的，易于操作的，重量轻。该SBIR I期项目开发并测试了一个反应堆，以进行快速铁羰基化。铁和镍羰基是可逆的放热气/固体反应。最先进的工业尺度反应堆的羰基受到严重阻碍，因此，在很大的范围内，达到高单位量反应率很高。拟议的快速铁羰基反应堆试图驱动远离平衡的可逆反应，以比最先进的羰基化快10倍的净羰基产量。该项目将对相关的混合物质金属矿石和工业废物进行测试，比台式实验的典型尺度要大得多（〜5 kg样品）。这些测试旨在在测试样品中提取近100％的铁和镍的100％，并产生可以容易加工的残留物，以产生高价值的稀土元素和其他关键金属。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并被认为是值得通过基金会的知识分子优点和更广泛影响的评估来审查的审查标准的值得通过评估来支持的。