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

这个小型企业技术转让(STTR)第一阶段项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力是提供一种新的、具有成本效益的技术，从水力压裂产生的废水中去除NORM(天然存在的放射性物质)。本文的研究对采油污水处理领域具有重要的理论和实践意义。拟议的方法寻求有效地从产出水中去除99%的标准，这是环境治理的一个重要进步。这种方法预计还将降低处理技术的成本以及对每桶天然气和石油成本的相关影响。该STTR第一阶段项目建议验证与水力压裂相关的新型吸附剂废水清理的有效性。含有石油和天然气矿藏的地质构造含有天然放射性核素物质，称为常量。石油和天然气水力压裂技术以集中的形式将标准带到地表，构成了辐射安全隐患。目前市场上还没有从浓缩生产中去除标准并有选择地回流的商业产品。通过利用基团贡献法(GCM)和一种新的基于优化的计算机辅助分子设计(CAMD)框架开发理论和计算方法，团队寻求生产出比目前商业上可用于去除采出水杂质的更好的粘土基吸附剂。模拟结果需要通过合成新的吸附剂并将其吸附行为与理论预测的吸附等温线进行比较来进行实验验证，然后才能将其商业化。这项研究可能导致使用新的CAMD框架和尖端实验为遇到的水污染类型定制高效和经济高效的吸附剂。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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 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.