SBIR Phase I: Nanofilters for Selective Gold Extraction

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目的更广泛影响是通过改善金属离子捕获来改善黄金提取。许多工业向各种复杂的水源排放越来越多的有毒重金属和贵重金属。这些感兴趣的金属在含有高浓度无机和有机干扰物的水混合物中往往是微量的。在这种条件下提取和浓缩这些物种是极其困难的。该项目采用新型混合材料，以高容量、快速、低成本的工艺，从水中选择性地快速提取微量浓度的不同有毒、稀有和/或有价值的金属。这些新材料可能会影响黄金等贵重金属的开采，产生新的可持续供应来源。拟议的项目是将一种混合纳米多孔材料应用到过滤装置中，并在工业中常见的连续流操作下评估其金提取性能。虽然间歇式吸附实验可以提供初步评估吸附剂的信息，但在连续动态条件下，必须进行连续固定床吸附实验，以获得其他关键信息，如突破时间、传质区长度和柱的最大容量。目前，混合材料被合成为纳米颗粒（在250纳米到500纳米之间），太小而无法在传统的过滤装置中实现，因此必须首先优化材料的形状和结构，以防止连续流动操作中的压降和材料损失。接下来进行连续流实验，研究柱床长度、柱床直径、吸附剂质量、流速、分析物浓度等参数。该项目将对原型开发模型进行验证和确认。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，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 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.