Physicochemical Principles of Critical Materials

9 units · Graduate

Spring: 9 units This course explores the physico-chemical principles underlying extraction, purification, and recovery of critical materials (e.g., the battery metals Li, Co, Ni, and Mn; the rare earths; semiconductor elements such as Ga and Ge; and the platinum-group metals). Typically, the feed is dilute, the target species are nearly chemically identical, and the source could be a brine or a spent battery. Rather than teach thermodynamics, kinetics, transport, and separations as four separate subjects, we build each through a recurring critical-materials system; the same Li/Na/Mg/Ca brine, for instance, is examined first for how far equilibrium allows a separation to go (thermodynamics), then for how fast the relevant reactions proceed (kinetics), and then for what limits the arrival of ions at the reacting surface (transport, separations). These principles are then applied to technologies including solvent extraction cascades, ligand design for rare-earth separation, membranes, flotation, crystallization, and adsorption/chromatography.