STTR Phase I: Novel Adsorbents for Selective Removal of Naturally Occurring Radionuclide Materials (NORM) from Fracking-Produced Water

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project is to provide a novel and cost-effective technology to remove NORM (Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials) from the wastewater produced by fracking. The proposed research is of fundamental and practical significance to the area of produced water treatment. The proposed approach seeks to remove 99% of NORM from produced waters effectively, an important advance for environmental treatment. This approach also is expected to reduce the cost of the treatment technology and the associated impact on cost per barrel of gas and oil. This STTR Phase I project proposes to verify the effectiveness of new adsorbents waste water clean-up associated with fracking. The geologic formations containing oil and gas deposits contain Naturally Occurring Radionuclide Materials, referred to as NORM. Oil and gas fracking brings NORM to the surface in a concentrated form, posing a radiation safety hazard. There is currently no commercial product on the market to remove NORM from concentrated produced and flow back water selectively. By developing theory and computational methods with the Group Contribution method (GCM) and a novel optimization-based Computer-Aided Molecular Design (CAMD) framework, the teams seeks to generate better clay-based adsorbents than are currently commercially available for removal of produced water impurities. The modeling results need to be verified experimentally by synthesizing thenew adsorbents and comparing their adsorption behavior to the theoretically-predicted isotherms before commercializing them. The research may result in efficient and cost-effective adsorbents customized for the type of water contamination encountered using the new CAMD frameworks and cutting-edge experiments.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.