Projects

Current Projects

Rare Earth Elements in U.S. Coal-Based Resources: Sampling, Characterization, and Round-Robin Interlaboratory Study
Spouted Fluid Beds for Chemical Looping Combustion
Economic Extraction and Recovery of REEs and Production of Clean Value-Added Products from Low-Rank Coal Fly Ash
Improvement of Alstom’s Limestone Chemical Looping Combustion Process for Higher Purity Flue Gas Production
Improving Coal Fired Plant Performance through Integrated Predictive and Condition-Based Monitoring Tools
Phase 2: Investigation of Rare Earth Element Extraction from North Dakota Coal-Related Feedstocks
Low-Cost and Recyclable Oxygen Carrier and Novel Process for Chemical Looping Combustion
Method for Separation of Coal Conversion Products from Sorbents/Oxygen Carriers
Methodology for Attrition Evaluation of Oxygen Carriers in Chemical Looping Systems
A Low Cost and Reproducible Synthetic Procedure for Mass Production of Lithium Iron Phosphate Cathode Materials for Lithium Ion Batteries
Evaluation of a Novel Crude Oil Conditioning Technology

Use of fossil fuels in a carbon constrained environment / carbon management:

Capture of CO2 using sorbent materials
Novel combustion technologies with a focus on chemical looping combustion
Co-production of products with energy production / activated carbon-steam-electricity
Modular-scale gasification (5 to 20 MW)
Efficiency improvement / Impacts of cyclic operation
New products from coal

Recovery of valuable/rare minerals and elements:

Recovery of rare earth elements from coal and coal by-products
Recovery of lithium, nickel and other valuable materials from oil field process waters
Recovery of rare earth elements and other valuable materials from recycled electronic wastes
Rare earth value chain including recovering other critical materials
Co-producing graphene and rare earth elements from Leonardite and lignite
Recycle lithium, nickel and others materials from waste batteries and other electronic wastes

Building a renewable energy portfolio – moving beyond fossil fuel:

Lithium iron phosphate batteries (cathode material development, battery management systems)
Developing and integrating energy storage devices into the grid – chemical (battery); thermochemical (CLC), and others
Energy policy using system dynamic analysis
Geothermal energy development
Wireless power generation

Support for Industry:

Advanced analytical characterization lab
Bench-scale systems for quick and low-cost analysis of combustion and gasification technologies
Build and test bench- and pilot-scale systems for new processes
Technological and economic feasibility analysis of new or modified processes
SBIR/STTR support

Other general areas of development / interest

Process water treatment
Development of wireless sensors for hostile environments (high temperature and/or corrosive)
Systems dynamics applications
Energy/water/food nexus
Synthesis of advanced materials (new rare earth alloys, materials for hostile environments, etc)
Oil & gas related research
Distributed energy
Environmental issues