Nanoconfined Interfaces for Highly Selective Separation of Critical Rare Earth Elements
- Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
- Univ. of Texas at El Paso, TX (United States)
- Temple Univ., Philadelphia, PA (United States)
- Miami Univ., Oxford, OH (United States)
Industrial demand for rare earth elements (REEs) has surged over the past three decades due to their unique properties that support sustainable energy and new technologies. Separating individual REEs is challenging and hazardous, typically done through liquid-liquid extraction. There is an urgent need for environmentally friendly and efficient separation technologies for REEs. Porous materials offer promising advances for sustainable REE separation via ion-selective capture. We hypothesize that REE separation can be efficiently achieved in reactive nanopores, such as Zr(IV) and Cr(III) metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), through surface functionalization. By integrating material synthesis, interfacial chemistry experiments, theory, computation, and machine learning, we gained insights into the chemical factors controlling REE speciation and their competitive adsorption on MOFs. Our findings show that these materials’ selectivity can be tuned by surface functionalization. The machine learning component addressed ion-specific diffusion based on MOF topology and chemistry.
- Research Organization:
- Sandia National Laboratories (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA); USDOE Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program
- DOE Contract Number:
- NA0003525
- OSTI ID:
- 2462944
- Report Number(s):
- SAND--2024-12635
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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