Iron Man would feel right at home with Professor Dev Chidambaram.
The Chemical & Materials Engineering faculty member is working with the University of ÁùºÏ±¦µä Las Vegas (UNLV) and the University of Houston on a project to pull iron out of iron ore using electricity rather than traditional methods, which impact the environment.
Of course, the fictional Tony Stark doesn’t actually need iron to save humanity, but he is an engineer with an interest in applying technological solutions to global concerns, such as air quality.
Chidambaram and his colleagues are addressing air quality and other issues in the iron industry with their project, Fast Electrowinning via Rotors for Responsible Iron Creation (FERRIC), which started up this fall. The project is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, with UNLV being the lead agency. The University of ÁùºÏ±¦µä, Reno’s portion of the award is $840,000.
The University specializes in this niche area, Chidambaram said, because of his team’s unique strengths in electrochemical engineering and the infrastructure in his Materials and Electrochemical Research (MER) lab.
“Engineers develop technologies that improve quality of life,” Chidambaram said. “Our team is working to develop a technology that could reduce a tenth of all global carbon emissions — something that could have global impact. When achieved, wouldn’t that be amazing?”
Cleaning up
The iron and steel industry accounts for about 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions and 11% of global carbon dioxide emissions (which are a subset of greenhouse gas emissions), according to the DOE. Both contribute to global warming, or the long-term heating of the earth’s surface.
At the same time, global demand for iron and steel is projected to rise by as much as 40% by 2050, according to the DOE.
The goal of FERRIC is to produce commercially viable, high-purity iron that will be suitable for ladle metallurgy (a way of refining iron for steel making) without greenhouse gas emissions. The project involves electrochemical deposition, also known as electrowinning, to get iron from its ore by using electricity to separate the metal from other materials in a liquid solution, or electrolyte.
The process, which produces no carbon emissions, has been in use for decades to extract metals such as copper or gold. More recently, it has been considered for iron production, as the DOE is working to decarbonize the industry.
Keep it moving
The FERRIC project proposes to refine iron electrowinning in a way that will allow for rapid production of pure iron at scale. The idea is to use a lot of electricity in a small area: more than 10,000 amps per square meter. The challenge here is to keep things moving inside the electrolyte so things don’t slow down — a problem called transport limitation.
To address that, this project aims to redesign the reactor where the electrowinning takes place by incorporating a novel rotary impeller (the rotating component of a pump that uses gears or other mechanisms to move liquid). This original design, according to the project description, will aid fast transport, refresh the electrolyte and remove evolved oxygen (oxygen produced as a byproduct during the process.)
Chidambaram and his team will be studying and developing the electrochemical aspect of the technology. At the electrochemical level, iron oxide is— in a sense— split, and iron is deposited in metallic form at the cathode while oxygen evolves at the anode.
A challenge in this technical design is the anode, where the oxygen forms, as the oxygen would corrode most economical and commercial materials. Chidambaram is focused on developing robust, low-cost anodes for this process. An expert in electrochemical engineering, corrosion and spectroscopy of materials, Chidambaram brings specialized knowledge to this project and other similar work: he currently is working with Idaho National Laboratory and Pennsylvania State University on a DOE-funded project to develop oxygen evolving anode materials for reprocessing of nuclear wastes.
