SBIR Phase II: High-Purity Extraction of PET from Textile Waste

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是允许从今天无法回收的复杂废物中回收有价值的材料。这一创新的商业影响是允许含有多种材料（如纺织品）的复杂废物流以成本低廉的方式作为制造新商品的原材料来源。这为使用这些原材料的企业提供了可持续的替代品，重要的是，这是一种成本更低、生产效率更高的材料。通过这种方式，将有重大的激励措施来重新使用成千上万吨的材料，这些材料今天要么被运往垃圾填埋场，海洋，要么被焚烧作为能源，这是一种非常低价值的应用。一个成功的资助项目将为复杂的多组分材料的回收提供一个全新的框架。 SBIR第二阶段项目建议开发分离复杂废物的新技术。纺织品等多组分废物占填埋总量的4%以上。今天，还不存在回收这些废物中的高价值材料的技术。拟议的项目旨在开发一种新的方法，使用化学技术，而不是简单的熔体回收，以实现从这些废物中回收高价值聚合物的增值。将进行化学工艺开发，以便将该技术的现状应用于试验工厂。该提案的主要技术目标是开发该工艺，以生产大量一致的高纯度产品。聚酯和尼龙等材料不能与天然或纤维素纤维（如棉花或其他纺织材料）分离。研究的目标是发展提议者目前的合成树脂分馏工艺，重点是在更大的体积下获得高纯度的产品。为此，各种化学和化学工程技术将被研究，以排除最终产品聚合物中的杂质。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project is to allow for the recycling of valuable materials from complex wastes that today cannot be recovered. The commercial impact from this innovation is to allow for complex waste streams that contain multiple materials, such as textiles, to serve as the source of raw materials for the manufacture of new goods in a way that is cost advantaged. This gives those businesses that use such raw materials a sustainable alternative and importantly, a lower-cost, efficiently produced material. In this way, there will be significant incentive for the reuse of thousands of tons of material that today either goes to landfills, oceans, or is incinerated for energy, a very low value application. A funded, successful project will yield an entirely new framework for recycling of complex, multi-component materials. This SBIR Phase II project proposes to develop novel technologies for fractionating complex wastes. Multi-component wastes such as textiles represent upwards of 4% of total landfill volume. Today, there does not exist technology for recovering the high-value materials that are in these wastes. The proposed project intends to develop a new approach using chemical techniques as opposed to simple melt recycling to enable the value-added recycling of high value polymers from such wastes. Chemical process development will take place in order to take the current status of the technology to implementation in a pilot plant. The main technical objective of the proposal is to develop the process so as to produce large amounts of consistent, high purity product. Materials such as polyester and nylon cannot be separated from natural or cellulosic fibers such as cotton or other textile materials. The goals of the research are to develop the proposers' current process for fractionating the synthetic resins with an emphasis on achieving high purity products at larger volumes. To this end, various chemistry and chemical engineering techniques will be investigated for exclusion of impurities from end product polymer at the kg scale.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.