Federal funding will help WSU professor develop technology to recover rare earth elements

Part of ARPA-E MINER initiative to develop commercially scalable technologies that will enable greater domestic supplies of rare earths, Guo’s project, “Mining Red Mud Waste for Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage and Critical Element Recovery,” is to use supercritical carbon dioxide to recover critical elements, especially rare earth elements, from aluminum production wastes (red mud). Predicting the transporting and depositing behaviors of rare earth elements (REE) in various ligand systems requires comprehensive thermodynamic understanding. Establishing an open-source thermochemistry database helps those efforts. However, it is still challenging to effectively integrate existing databases or reviews with the constantly increasing number of scientific publications. Recent developments of large language models (LLMs) and related retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technique enables a potential solution to automatically retrieve the information of interest from the publications. Guo's team is developing an information retrieval pipeline to obtain the thermodynamic and solubility properties of rare earth minerals automatically and constantly.

“We are excited to work with PNNL and ASU to develop thermodynamic database of rare earth carbonate speciation under critical CO2 conditions, through data mining, spectroscopic and solubility studies,” Guo said. “The established database will promote understanding in extraction and separation of rare earth from red muds.”

The research results are published in this article.

Read the full article at WSU News.