SBIR Phase I: Nanofilters for Selective Gold Extraction

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The broader impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to improve gold extraction by improving metal ion capture. Many industries discharge increasing amounts of toxic heavy and valuable metals into different complex water sources. These metals of interest tend to be at trace amounts in water mixtures containing high concentrations of inorganic and organic interferents. It is extremely difficult to extract and concentrate such species in these conditions. This project employs novel hybrid materials to selectively and rapidly extract different toxic, rare and/or valuable metal species at trace concentrations from water in a high-capacity, rapid, cost-effective process. These new materials could impact mining of valuable metals like gold, generating new sustainable supply sources. The proposed project is to implement a hybrid nano-porous material into filter devices and evaluate its gold extracting performance under a continuous flow operation typically seen in industry. Although batch adsorption experiments can provide information to initially assess adsorbents, continuous fixed-bed adsorption experiments must be conducted to obtain other crucial information such as breakthrough time, length of mass transfer zone and maximum capacity of the column under those continuous dynamic conditions. Currently, the hybrid materials are synthesized as nanoparticles (between 250 nm and 500 nm), too small to be implemented in a traditional filter device so that the materials must be optimally shaped and structured first to prevent pressure drops and loss of materials in the continuous flow operation. Next, continuous flow experiments will be conducted to study parameters such as column bed length, column bed diameter, adsorbent mass, flow rate and analyte concentration. The project will conduct verification and validation of a model for prototype development.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.