RAPID Funded Projects

This project aims to collect physical property and thermodynamics data for impactful bio-products and their separations, build thermodynamic models to represent multicomponent mixtures’ behavior, and incorporate these models into process simulation environments to allow for faster and more cost-effective scale-up of bio-separations technologies. The project work specifically targets the separation of organic acids from multicomponent mixtures typically encountered in bioprocess operations, using three distinct separation technologies: adsorption, membranes, and electrochemical techniques.

The goal of this project is to scale-up current electromagnetic (EM) reactor technology from its current TRL 4 stage to a pre-commercially relevant TRL 5-6, and to demonstrate the production of light olefins from disadvantaged carbon feedstocks (waste plastics) using pre-commercial EM (microwave and RF induction) powered reactors at relevant scales (≥100 kg/day). Project goals include (1) demonstrate the decarbonized production of light olefins by utilizing renewable electricity, (2) improved energy efficiency by optimizing the heat input into the highly endothermic ethylene dehydrogenation reaction, and (3) improve selectivity and conversion efficiency. The EM process employed results in highly efficient, ultrafast heating at the catalyst surface (sub-microsecond), and high catalytic conversion and selectivity for dehydrogenation of hydrocarbon feedstocks. Ultimately, scaling up light olefin production via EM reactors will demonstrate the ability of these new technologies to radically reduce the carbon intensity for producing critical commodity chemicals at commercially relevant scales.

Using RAPID’s well-proven approach to setting and tracking project tasks and milestones, the team will create and test a standardized framework and modular processing testbed/Center Of Excellence (COE) for accelerated development of processes to manufacture active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) specialty chemical precursors. The project will immediately impact coronavirus response through creation and testing of a new accelerated methodology and modular processing COE for development of processes to manufacture API specialty chemical precursors. Tools and capabilities such as this do not currently exist in the U.S. for general use. The process development framework and national asset testbed capabilities will be made available to RAPID’s members and disseminated broadly to AIChE’s Process Development Division and Pharmaceutical Discovery, Development and Manufacturing Forum (PD2M). The team envisions that the COE will also serve as a tool to develop processes and build production capacity for on-shoring of selected specialty chemicals, API precursors, and APIs, and the COE/MATRIC (now called AVN) may serve as a production center for future coronavirus response scenarios.

The VTOTP project will baseline current technician and operator training, identify learning and development gaps, and align new training with industry needs voiced by representatives from relevant industries through the development and distribution of five eLearning courses. Through the achievement of three outcomes (roadmap, eLearning courses, and distribution to 200 learners), the project will have a national impact through access to a virtual, on-demand arsenal of courses which could be accessed from anywhere in the U.S. at any time and bring prospective workers up-to-speed quickly for industries that produce items critical to the supply chain including medications, PPE, vaccines, critical consumer goods, etc. Additionally, broad accessibility to advanced manufacturing training in a virtual environment allows equitable access to individuals in the current and future workforce pipeline, particularly those disproportionally impacted by coronaviruses.

The objective of this project is to demonstrate the electrochemical exfoliation of graphene and laboratory and pilot scales, scale the continuous production of graphene in larger volumes, and demonstrate proof-of-concept for high performance respirator masks and nano-biosensor applications. This project was awarded as part of the NIST Rapid Assistance for Coronavirus Economic Response (RACER) Grant Program.

New York is the third largest dairy state in the U.S and it generates over 22 million tons of dairy and food wastes per year. Current waste management practices involve storage of untreated wastes in landfills and lagoons which pose significant environmental risks to river basins and lakes due to runoff and climate impacts resulting from fugitive methane emissions. Disposal and treatment of these wastes is typically viewed as a financial burden, but with the right combination of process technologies, it can become a resource for energy and nutrient recovery. The primary goal of this project is to evaluate the economic and technical feasibility of deploying a system of centralized biorefineries using a combination of Anaerobic Digestion (AD), Hydrothermal Liquefaction (HTL) and Biomethanation Power-to-gas (PtG) systems to process agricultural and food wastes. This project will specifically focus on spatial optimization and techno-economic modeling of these processes to develop a user-friendly assessment tool to highlight the potential of combining energy, dairy and food waste management systems to maximize resource recovery, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and lowering local environmental impacts within a circular economy, all while ensuring cost-cutting and energy efficiency targets.

Water-stressed regions are exploring more nontraditional water sources and energy intensive technologies such as reverse osmosis (RO) to secure and augment their freshwater supply. As RO effectively rejects most of the dissolved species and recovers approximately 50 to 80% of water depending on water source, it also generates a relatively large concentrate waste stream. Management of concentrate streams in inland applications is the key technology hurdle to overcome as it often requires the integration of one or more unit operations. This project proposes a solution to concentrate management through an intensified solar-energy capture desalination system that integrates membrane distillation (MD) with a hybrid concentrated solar power (CSP)/photovoltaic (PV) collector to realize self-sustained desalination of concentrate streams in inland and off-grid applications. Direct utilization of solar heat from CSP and electricity from PV for water purification enables higher energy productivity, and thus lower levelized cost of water and energy. Succesful engineering and design of the proposed system for water reuse applications would prove that the system could be used for treatment of high-salinity waste streams from other chemical and commodity process streams.

Membrane gas separation is a financially significant and technologically critical component of the gas purification industry as it offers capital and operating cost advantages compared to other gas separation methods such as distillation, absorption, and adsorption. Many new polymer membrane materials have been proposed in recent years, but too often the cost of those materials and the inability to source commercial quantities prevent membrane manufacturers from developing new products. This project plans on addressing those drawbacks by introducing a new family of renewable, high-performance furanic-based polymers. Work in this project will focus on furanic-based polymer selection, hollow-fiber development, material characterization, and membrane testing for hydrogen recovery from mixed gas streams (e.g. H2/CO, H2/CO2, H2/N2/NH3) for commercial applications. Preliminary work on permeation tests has shown promising results, and the membrane separators have the potential to reduce capital costs by 10x, increase H2 recovery energy efficiency by 20% all while reducing the cost of separation by 20% and reducing waste by 20%.

The goal of this project is to provide a near term technology solution for the distributed generation of renewable hydrogen for fuel cell vehicle applications. This project will investigate a novel Caustic Aqueous Phase Electrochemical Reforming (CAPER) process on an oxigenated hydrocarbon, liquid ethanol in this instance, to make strides towards the DOE’s long-term cost target of $4/kg of hydrogen at the dispenser. The proposed CAPER technology utilizes liquid ethanol and electricity, preferably from intermittent renewable sources, to produce high purity (99.99%) hydrogen at high pressure directly from the reactor and without the use of precious metal catalysts. The CAPER technology also separates the produced CO2 from H2 in-situ by converting it to water-soluble HCO3-, leaving the gaseous hydrogen to bubble out of the caustic solution. The solution is then regenerated by removing high purity carbon dioxide from the solution that can be sequestered or reused.

Metal halide salts such as magnesium chloride have been demonstrated to be promising candidates for ammonia storage materials to enable applications such as intermittent energy storage, and distributed fertilizer production. Ammonia exiting a synthesis reactor can be separated from nitrogen and hydrogen by absorption into magnesium chloride. Compared with ammonia condensation seen in large-scale Haber-Bosch processes, ammonia absorption enables more complete separation at temperatures closer to the synthesis reactor, which can realize capital and energy savings that are necessary for cost-competitive distributed-scale modularization of ammonia production. This team has already fabricated a 1 kg/day modular synthesis protoype, funded by ARPA-E, being used to study this absorption process in a UMN exsisting wind-to-ammonia facility in western Minnesota. The project team has shown, in a preliminary techno-economic analysis (TEA), that absorption can offer competitive economics at small scale ammonia production relevant for distributed modular operations. Work with RAPID will include optimization and modeling of the prototype over a useful and relevant range of absorption cycling conditions - most importantly, the uptake and regeneration temperatures. The improved validated models provided by this optimized prototype will support better novel design, future optimization, and provide a step to safe and efficient further scaleup to commercial modular metric tonne per day capcities in the future. Additionally, longer-term testing with the protoype will be performed to produce useful stability and de-risking data.