A team led by Technology Metals Research LLC, Carpentersville, Ill., has been awarded $1.2M in funding from the U.S .Army Research Laboratory, to help develop the key components for a domestic rare-earth supply chain for heavy and other critical rare-earth elements. The funding was awarded through a sub-award agreement with Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The project involves a dozen companies and research institutions in the United States, Canada, and Australia,
In recent years the rare-earth sector has been dominated by China, which provides approximately 90% of global supply. The heavy rare earths dysprosium and yttrium were recently mandated for inclusion in the DOD’s National Defense Stockpile, despite not being produced in the United States from U.S.-based sources.
Project partners include Innovation Metals Corp.= and researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of South Australia, and the ARL itself. A number of ‘stealth-mode’ companies and researchers with promising new technologies will also participate in the program.
Gareth Hatch, co-founder of TMR and president of IMC, is the Principal Investigator for the 12-month program. “Besides validating IMC’s process-flow diagrams for the bulk solvent extraction of heavy and critical REEs,” he says, “this award from the ARL will allow the team to evaluate new process technologies that have the potential to revolutionize the speed and efficiency of REE extraction and separation. These are exciting, materials-science-based approaches that have not been seen by the rare-earth sector before.”
In addition to coordinating the existing program activities, TMR remains open to looking at additional processes and to collaborations with other groups, which could contribute to the overall objectives of the project.
