Principal Investigator Antoine Allanore
Project Website http://allanore.mit.edu/Home.html
The Allanore Group is focusing on materials extraction and manufacturing. Most major mining and metallurgical processes are more than 100 years old, developed at a time of limited awareness of their environmental impact and the issue of resources limitations. These two issues are covered nowadays by the term «sustainability», which also encompasses a cost metric when applied to primary materials. Unfortunately, all the easy problems limiting the operational as well as environmental costs of metals extraction and manufacturing have been solved, and innovative approaches are needed to cope with both globalization and earth intrinsic limitations.
In the field of metal extraction, our approach to enhance metal recovery and sustainability consists in operating the separation directly at the reduction step using electricity. In this scope, we are currently investigating the development of a new electrochemical route for metals production in extreme environments (molten sulfides or rare-earth oxides). The principle of this process is to extract the elements individually or in the form of alloys in the molten state in an electrolysis cell, in order to replace the existing capital intensive and environmentally harmful beneficiation operations.
On the manufacturing front, we are investigating the direct forming of alloys by electrochemical technics in collaboration with a large end-user of precious metals. The overarching idea is to provide a manufacturing tool that eliminates numerous unit-operations, ultimately increasing the productivity and limiting the scrap-rate of a manufacture-intensive business.
For mining, the innovative approach consists in incorporating into a single reactor various techniques belonging to different fields (physical and chemical separation for example), in order to minimize water usage, chemicals consumption and the amount of residue. We are also pursuing the understanding of minerals leaching process from a chemical and materials science view point. This will lead to a new technology that will control the rate of release of nutrient from local sources of fertilizers, a crucial issue in countries with limited access to classical resources (e.g. KCl).