The building blocks the group specializes in actually are a recently developed, increasingly versatile class of materials known as metal-organic frameworks (MOF).  An emerging technology in the scientific community, MOFs are porous crystalline polymers made up of metal ions or metal-containing components and organic ligands.

MOF Example From Texas A&M. Click image for more info.

Zhou says, “It’s very fair to say that, in the last decade, the fastest-growing field in chemistry is the study of metal-organic frameworks. The MOF field was formed only about 15 years ago, but it has already shown a lot of promise. We are just one of many teams worldwide working with this exciting new type of material, because the scope of the research is enormous.”

Zhou and his team focus on MOF’s ability to selectively capture carbon dioxide from the exhaust of coal-fired power plants. Though coal is a cheap natural resource, its long-term and widespread use has been a main contributor to the rapidly increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Zhou notes that capturing carbon dioxide using MOF, coupled with proper sequestration and/or utilization, not only would slow down the escalation of greenhouse gas levels but also allow power plants to continue using inexpensive coal.

Zhou explains that while MOFs come in a huge number of varieties, only a fraction is suitable for carbon capture. Finding that fraction and then maximizing its potential represents the crux of the tedious yet vital chore facing Zhou and his team.

Compounding the complicated matter of piecing together the correct framework is the fact that only a handful of places worldwide conduct large-scale tests on carbon-capture techniques, given the energy industry’s somewhat understandable reluctance to implement such experimental, power-sapping processes. Zhou explains that even the most current state-of-the-art carbon-capture procedure would lead to a 30 percent parasitic power consumption, thereby significantly reducing the power plant’s overall efficiency.

Zhou’s group may have found the alternative. He said they are in the process of constructing a unique subset of MOF that can capture carbon dioxide with extremely high selectivity while using much less power than what is required by commonly applied carbon-capture methods. The group’s goal is to create an MOF that binds only with carbon dioxide and is robust enough to withstand the harsh conditions of the flue gas, resulting in a more economical carbon-capture technique. If successful, it could significantly reduce the amount of carbon dioxide currently being emitted into the atmosphere.

With good progress at hand Zhou readily admits the work with carbon-capturing MOF is far from finished. He says his group’s next big undertaking will be to determine if carbon dioxide can be separated from a flue gas – the exhaust from chimneys, ovens and steam generators – using MOF. In addition, he says there is much more research to be conducted with MOF’s ability to store hydrogen and methane, efforts which will continue into the indefinite future.

The MOF future does look bright, indeed.  Zhou said, “In terms of the scope of potential application of MOF, we have barely scratched the surface,” noting beyond carbon capture, MOFs may become useful in gas separation in general.

“Using this new material, the gasses would come in, and the ones that are the right size would stay, while the others would pass. Separation can be performed at a fraction of the original cost using cryo-distillation,” Zhou explains, “Normally in the chemical and petroleum industry, one of the most energy-intensive procedures is the separation of gases, considering you have to liquefy them by compressing and then cooling them. Then you have to do distillation by evaporating and cooling what you wanted to separate. It’s a total waste of energy.”

Beginning in the 1990s, MOFs have been seen with a bright future as an eco-friendly technology that could provide for major improvements in natural gas usage for transportation and in the commercialization of hydrogen-powered vehicles. In their crystalline form, they appear to resemble nothing more than ordinary table salt.

Looks, however, are deceiving, considering MOF have the highest internal surface area known to man. Once unraveled, one sugar-cube-sized piece could cover an entire football field.

In addition to having exceptionally high porosity, Zhou says they are the most tunable material of any known substance. With just a tweak of their crystalline structure and surface properties, they become ideal for absorbing any type of different molecule, lending to their versatility in application.

MOF technology is perhaps still a gestational field.  As noted above the possible combinations to make MOFs is astonishing.  The ‘break’ Zhou is experiencing is a solid step to the breakthrough. But the work is not just find a set of MOFs that work with CO2 at the situations demand, but the MOF has to be made, commercially, flush freed of the CO2 cheaply and last a long time.  Finding that could take a while.

But Zhou is leading the field.  His group is zeroing in a on a highly useful application.  And the application is soon to be much more important than greenhouse gas when the media and populace realize CO2 is the circulation system of life on earth.

An average 30x increase in catalyst activity is no small matter.  That potential could establish a new series of processes from biofuel to industrial chemicals to household items.  Over a broad range of applications the impact would be very impressive.

Photoactivated Enzyme Compared. Click image for the largest view.

The press release quotes Agarwal in describing how the idea of using light functions in nature.

“When light enters the eye and hits the pigment known as rhodopsin, it causes a complex chemical reaction to occur, including a conformational change,” Agarwal said. “This change is detected by the associated protein and through a rather involved chain of reactions is converted into an electrical signal for the brain.”

As everyone quickly realizes this happens very fast indeed.

Using that as a model, Agarwal’s team theorized that it should be possible to improve the catalytic efficiency of enzyme reactions by attaching chemical elements on the surface of an enzyme and manipulating them with the use of tuned light.

The team introduced a light-activated molecular switch across two regions of the enzyme Candida antarctica lipase B, or CALB – which breaks down fat molecules that was identified through modeling performed on DOE’s Jaguar supercomputer.

“Using this approach, our preliminary work with CALB suggested that such a technique of introducing a compound that undergoes a light-inducible conformational change onto the surface of the protein could be used to manipulate enzyme reaction,” Agarwal said.

While the researchers obtained final laboratory results at industry partner AthenaES, computational modeling allowed Agarwal to test thousands of combinations of enzyme sites, modification chemistry, different wavelengths of light, different temperatures and photo-activated switches. Simulations performed on Jaguar also allowed researchers to better understand how the enzyme’s internal motions control the catalytic activity.

The team’s work seems like a hyper speed evolutionary process.

“This modeling was very important as it helped us identify regions of the enzyme that were modified by interactions with chemicals,” said Agarwal, a member of ORNL’s Computer Science and Mathematics Division. “Ultimately, the modeling helped us understand how the mechanical energy from the surface can eventually be transferred to the active site where it is used to conduct the chemical reaction.”

Agarwal noted that enzymes are present in every organism and are widely used in industry as catalysts in the production of biofuels and countless other every day products. Researchers believe this finding could have immense potential for improving enzyme efficiency, especially as it relates to biofuels.

The team includes Christopher Schultz and Sheldon Broedel Jr. of AthenaES, Aristotle Kalivretenos of Aurora Analytics and Brahma Ghosh, an independent consultant.

A 30x average is going to be a major change. Even if a commercial version is only half as good, the change will be very significant.  This stage isn’t prompting cost analysis, but the cost other than the enzymes themselves isn’t going to be a major issue unless moving the processed material along requires a rework – not a bad thing.

Still, the enzymes might turn out to be quite costly in the short term.  But the opportunity is huge and cost cutting and more speed is sure to be on everyone agenda.

Congratulation to Agarwal and his team.  A great insight, even greater results!

Hitachi's New Synchronous Amorphous Metal Motor. Click image for the largest view.

The announcement has the new 11 kW motor’s efficiency rated at about 93% and running at the highest of the International Efficiency classes, IE4 Super Premium Efficiency performance.  The motor is even smaller than a conventional motor of comparable size.

Hitachi New Motor Compared in Size to Conventional Motor.

Japan has been deeply affected by the short-lived Chinese embargo of rare earth elements and the export restrictions that continue to this day.  That event set off an increased rush of research in magnets freed from using the heretofore-common neodymium (Nd-Fe-B) magnet.

The new Hitachi and Hitachi Industrial Equipment Systems joint project motor is designed to work at industrial jobs such as running large fans for sending air and operating fluid pumps.

The new 11 kW double-rotor, axial-gap motor uses a laminated stator core based on a low-loss amorphous iron material. Hitachi says that the losses from its laminated material are about 10% of those of conventional electromagnetic steel laminations.

Hitachi Photo of the Amorphous Iron Core

An amorphous metal has a disordered atomic structure versus the crystalline structure of conventional metals, and features a high tensile strength and extremely low magnetic losses. As such, it has been a target of interest for motor development for decades. Its adoption, however, has been hampered by the cost of manufacturing.  Hitachi says it’s an issue they’re addressing.

Compared with magnetic steel sheets, which are commonly used to build rotors, the amorphous metal has about 10 times higher magnetic permeability, and its energy loss (iron loss) as a magnetic material is about 1/10th, making it easy to improve motor efficiency.

The structure of the motor employs an “axial gap method” that uses two rotors to sandwich a stator in the direction of the axis of rotation in the aim of increasing the amount of ferrite magnet used for the motor.

In the structure of the iron core, the firms changed the method of processing the amorphous metal. The amorphous metal is as thin as 25μm and has a higher strength than a magnetic steel sheet.

In the past, they used the “rolled iron core structure,” which forms an iron core by rolling the amorphous metal without cutting it. With this method, however, a remaining stress is generated inside the material by bending it, increasing iron loss.  But this time they’ve developed a technology to cut the amorphous metal and employed the “laminated iron core structure,” which laminates the metal. As a result, they prevented iron loss from being increased by the process.

The firms have also made improvements to the structures of the motor to increase the output power and efficiency of the motor.  They improved the motor’s resistance to torque reaction force by increasing output power by using a resin with fracture toughness is as high as 3.1MPa√m for the stator. And they changed the structure of the rotor so that it can withstand high centrifugal forces.

Hitachi has been working at developments since at least 2008 when they announced an 86% efficient motor that was 5% more efficient that the contemporary motors using rare earth magnets.

Hitachi used 3D magnetic field analysis software to analyze the various characteristics of the core laminations to optimize the efficiency of the laminated design.

This is all great news for the electric motor field.  Just keep in mind that the design of a motor needs to match the use, and there are several basic designs in use today.  The Hitachi design here is for low starting torque – not something your anticipated electric vehicle can use.  Still the Hitachi motor application class is huge and much of the material developments can transfer to other designs.

The most encouraging portion is the prospect of mass-produced amorphous metal production – something a firm like Hitachi can be expected to accomplish.  Once that threshold is achieved the amorphous magnet market might get quite a bit bigger very quickly.

Copper supplies are an issue that has to be taken more seriously. With rare earth elements also racing to the last marginal gram for sale, adding copper to the list of semiprecious metals could be a major industrial drag.  No matter how efficient or fuel saving or energy extending, if the materials aren’t there for mass production the prices of goods will not get to positive mass economic impact.

Copper is hard to find.  The earth has been pretty well scoured for economically viable copper.  The big economically useful deposits are already being mined.  More needs to be found.

A new Rice University study published this week in the journal Science found nature conspires at both the large scale of tectonic plates down to small-scale molecular bonds to keep most of Earth’s copper buried dozens of miles below ground.

Geochemist Cin-Ty Lee, the lead author of the study explains the situation, “Everything throughout history shows us that Earth does not want to give up its copper to the continental crust. Both the building blocks for continents and the continental crust itself, dating back as much as 3 billion years, are highly depleted in copper.”

Garnet Pyroxenite Xenolith. Click image for the largest view.

The Rice team didn’t start the research looking for copper – they were looking at how continents formed and the role oxygen played.  For the research the Lee led the team to examine the Earth’s arc magmas, the molten building blocks for continents.

Arc magmas get their start deep in the planet in areas called subduction zones, where one of Earth’s tectonic plates slides beneath another. When plates subduct, two things happen, they bring oxidized crust and sediments from Earth’s surface into the mantle and the subducting plate drives a return flow of hot mantle upwards from Earth’s deep interior. During this return flow, the hot mantle not only melts itself but may also cause melting of the recycled sediments. Arc magmas are thought to form under these conditions, so if oxygen were required for continental crust formation, it would mostly likely come from these recycled segments.

Lee explains the expected clue with, “If oxidized materials are necessary for generating such melts, we should see evidence of it all the way from where the arc magmas form to the point where the new continent-building material is released from arc volcanoes.”

The team examined xenoliths, rocks that formed deep inside Earth and were carried up to the surface in volcanic eruptions. Specifically, they studied garnet pyroxenite xenoliths thought to represent the first crystallized products of arc magmas from the deep roots of an arc some 50 kilometers (31 miles or 163,680 feet) below Earth’s surface.

Rather than finding evidence of oxidation, they found sulfides – minerals that contain reduced forms of sulfur bonded to metals like copper, nickel and iron. If conditions were highly oxidizing, Lee said, these sulfide minerals would be destabilized and allow these elements, particularly copper, to bond with oxygen.

Here’s the bad news – because sulfides are also heavy and dense, they tend to sink and get left behind in the deep parts of arc systems.  Lee likens the effect to a blob of dense material that stays at the bottom of a lava lamp while less dense material rises to the top.

Lee’s theory, “This explains why copper deposits, in general, are so rare. The Earth wants to hold it deep and not give it up.”

Lee and the research team are pointing out that where to look for undiscovered copper deposits requires an understanding of the conditions needed to overcome the forces that conspire to keep it deep inside the planet.

Lee explains, “As a continental arc matures, the copper-rich sulfides are trapped deep and accumulate. But if the continental arc grows thicker over time, the accumulated copper-bearing sulfides are driven to deeper depths where the higher temperatures can re-melt these copper-rich dregs, releasing them to rejoin arc magmas.”

This can be seen in the Andes Mountains and in western North America. He said other potential sources of undiscovered copper include Siberia, northern China, Mongolia and parts of Australia.  They are not likely at the surface like Chile or Montana, but the chances for discoveries look much better now.

Encouraging but not reassuring.  The confidence needed for copper supplies to stay abundant hasn’t changed.  Copper might be the next commodity for a massive price increase.

Lee wouldn’t have gotten this far without some serendipity.  Daphne Jin, a high school intern played a role in the research paper that’s now a freshman at the University of Chicago found the continents are depleted in copper.

Lee personalizes the story with, “The paper really wouldn’t have been as broad without Daphne’s contribution. I originally struggled with an assignment for her because I didn’t and still don’t have large projects where a student can just fit in. I try to make sure every student has a chance to do something new, but often I just run out of ideas.”

Eventually Lee asked Jin to compile information from published studies about the average concentration of all the first-row of transition elements in the periodic table in various samples of continental crust and mantle collected the world over.

“She came back and showed me the results, and we could see that the average continental crust itself, which has been built over 3 billion years of Earth’s history in Africa, Siberia, North America, South America, etc., was all depleted in copper,” Lee said. “Up to that point we’d been looking at the building blocks of continents, but this showed us that the continents themselves followed the same pattern. It was all internally consistent.”

Over the coming years, barring another large find or two, copper will likely rise in price.  At the moment, China is building a copper stockpile to the puzzled consternation of curious analysts.  For an industrial nation the plan is: A, use the copper for producing goods, or plan B, be hold it as a store of wealth.

Maybe the question is becoming, “Where are copper bars for sale?”

The study published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society reports the key is adding gold to the catalyst formation process to yield a more uniform crystal structure and the new crystal removes carbon monoxide from the reaction.

That’s the news – getting the carbon monoxide away.  Platinum absorbs carbon monoxide in reactions involving fuel cells powered by organic materials like formic acid.  Palladium breaks down over time.  Both of these metals are very costly.

The Brown University created a triple-headed metallic nanoparticle that they say outperforms and outlasts all others at the anode end in formic-acid fuel-cell reactions. They report a 4-nanometer iron-platinum-gold nanoparticle (FePtAu), with a tetragonal crystal structure, generates higher current per unit of mass than any other nanoparticle catalyst tested.  Better yet, Brown’s triple metal nanoparticle performs nearly as well after 13 hours as it did at the start.

Gold Enhanced Fuel Cell Catalyst Crystal

That compares to another test built nanoparticle challenged under identical conditions that lost nearly 90% of its performance in just one-quarter of the time.

Shouheng Sun, chemistry professor at Brown and corresponding author on the paper said, “We’ve developed a formic acid fuel-cell catalyst that is the best to have been created and tested so far. It has good durability as well as good activity.”

The bit of gold starts the positive effect right at the beginning, when the crystals are built.  The gold acts as an atomic atom organizer of sorts, leading the iron and platinum atoms into neat, uniform layers within the nanoparticle.  Then the gold atoms then exit the interior and bind to the outer surface of the nanoparticle assembly.

Gold is effective at ordering the iron and platinum atoms because the gold atoms create extra space within the nanoparticle sphere at the outset. When the gold atoms diffuse from the space upon heating, they create more room for the iron and platinum atoms to assemble themselves. As a bonus the gold creates the crystallization chemists want in the nanoparticle assembly at a lower temperature.

Gold Enhanced Fuel Cell Catalyst Temperature Response. Image Credit: American Chemical Society.

In operation the gold also removes carbon monoxide (CO) from the reaction by catalyzing its oxidation. Otherwise the carbon monoxide, which binds well to iron and platinum atoms, would gum up the reaction. By essentially scrubbing it from the reaction, gold improves the performance of the combined iron-platinum catalyst.

The team decided to try gold after reading in the literature that gold nanoparticles were effective at oxidizing carbon monoxide – so effective, in fact, that gold nanoparticles had been incorporated into the helmets of Japanese firefighters. Indeed, the Brown team’s triple-headed metallic nanoparticles worked just as well at removing CO in the oxidation of formic acid, although it is unclear specifically why.

In the study paper the Brown team highlights the importance of creating an ordered crystal structure for the nanoparticle catalyst. The gold additive helps researchers get a crystal structure called a “face-centered-tetragonal,” a four-sided shape in which iron and platinum atoms essentially are forced to occupy specific positions in the structure, creating more order. By imposing atomic order, the iron and platinum layers bind more tightly in the structure, thus making the assembly more stable and durable, essential to better-performing and longer-lasting catalysts.

The Brown team’s tests are extraordinary.  The paper reports experiments showing the FePtAu catalyst reached 2809.9 mA/mg Pt (mass-activity, or current generated per milligram of platinum), “which is the highest among all NP (nanoparticle) catalysts ever reported.”. After 13 hours, the FePtAu nanoparticle has a mass activity of 2600mA/mg Pt, or 93% of its original performance value. The Brown team pointed out in comparison, the well-received platinum-bismuth nanoparticle has a mass activity of about 1720mA/mg Pt under identical experiments, and is four times less active when measured for durability.

The team also notes that other metals may be substituted for gold in the nanoparticle catalyst to improve the catalyst’s performance and durability.  The team says in the study “This communication presents a new structure-control strategy to tune and optimize nanoparticle catalysis for fuel oxidations.”

This work is a breakthrough concept in crystal catalyst design.  The ideas explored are going to have significant impact as the concept finds application across the catalyst field.  The matter of scale will come up, but right out of the gate the team is addressing life expectancy with great results.

Who’s on the team?  Inquiring headhunters will want to know.

Sen Zhang, a third-year graduate student in Sun’s lab, helped with the nanoparticle design and synthesis. Shaojun Guo, a postdoctoral fellow in Sun’s lab performed electrochemical oxidation experiments. Huiyuan Zhu, a second-year graduate student in Sun’s lab, synthesized the FePt nanoparticles and ran control experiments. The other contributing author is Dong Su from the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at Brookhaven National Laboratory, who analyzed the structure of the nanoparticle catalyst using the advanced electron microscopy facilities there.

Hold on – the funding was from ExxonMobil and the U.S. Department of Energy.

May the tech spread far and wide.  Congratulations!

Wang said, “This is very surprising because spider silk is organic material. For organic material, this is the highest ever. There are only a few materials higher – silver and diamond.”

Usually and most commonly we move heat by heating water, piping it somewhere to use it for a purpose.  Spider silk has been and is still in research for its strength and ways to produce it at scale.  Now there is another motivator and huge potential markets.

Wang work is the study of thermal conductivity, the ability of materials to conduct heat. He’s been looking for organic materials that can effectively transfer heat. It’s something most materials from living things aren’t very good at all.  The best are diamonds, copper and aluminum that are very good, the very best, diamonds and silver are quite expensive and hardly suitable for most uses.

Spider silk has some interesting properties: its very strong, very stretchy, only 4 microns thick (human hair is about 60 microns).  Until now no one had actually tested spider silk for its thermal conductivity.

Spider Silk Properties Diagram. Full details in the study paper linked below. Image courtesy Iowa State University.

Wang decided to try some lab experiments with Xiaopeng Huang, a post-doctoral research associate in mechanical engineering; and Guoqing Liu, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering, becoming a team to help with the project.

So he ordered eight spiders – Nephila clavipes, golden silk orbweavers - and put them to work eating crickets and spinning webs in the cages he set up in an Iowa State University greenhouse.  Wang and his research team found that spider silks – particularly the draglines that anchor webs in place – conduct heat better than most materials, including very good conductors such as silicon, aluminum and pure iron. Spider silk also conducts heat 1,000 times better than woven silkworm silk and 800 times better than other organic tissues.

The results have been published in the journal Advanced Materials, New Secrets of Spider Silk: Exceptionally High Thermal Conductivity and its Abnormal Change under Stretching.  The paper reports that using laboratory techniques developed by Wang, spider silk conducts heat at the rate of 416 watts per meter Kelvin.  That compares to copper at 401 – your skin measures 0.6.

Wang said, “I think we tried the right material. Our discoveries will revolutionize the conventional thought on the low thermal conductivity of biological materials. This takes time and patience. “

The research reveals a surprising attribute about spider silk; Wang explains that when spider silk is stretched, thermal conductivity also goes up. Wang said stretching spider silk to its 20 percent limit also increases conductivity by 20 percent. Most materials lose thermal conductivity when they’re stretched.  This is astonishing news.

Wang wrote in the study paper the discovery “opens a door for soft materials to be another option for thermal conductivity tuning.”  It could lead to spider silk helping to create flexible, heat-dissipating parts for electronics, better clothes for hot weather, bandages that don’t trap heat and many other everyday applications.

Wang’s expertise comes to fore with a high quality explanation in lay terms explaining the technology is all about the defect-free molecular structure of spider silk, including proteins that contain nanocrystals and the spring-shaped structures connecting the proteins. Wang suggests more research needs to be done to fully understand spider silk’s heat-conducting abilities.

Wang is also wondering if spider silk can be modified in ways that enhance its thermal conductivity. He said the researchers’ preliminary results are very promising.

For the university press release Wang marveled at what he’s learning about spider webs, everything from spider care to web unraveling techniques to the different silks within a single web.

“I’ve been doing thermal transport for many years,” Wang said. “This is the most exciting thing, what I’m doing right now.”

Just so Professor, for us too.  Spider silk is one technology with an immense product and market range and you’ve just amplified the potential many times over.  Thanks!

That’s the estimate of Jay Chmelauskas, President of Western Lithium who said in a company press release, “As an electric car owner, the move to automobile electrification now seems obvious and imminent. Production of lithium in Nevada not only has the benefit of long-term mining and chemical industry jobs, but also has the potential to support downstream technology and manufacturing jobs in America.  Lithium is the enabling metal for electric transportation.”

Western Lithium USA Corporation, which is publicly traded, announced the completion of a positive pre-feasibility study for its wholly owned Kings Valley Lithium Project in Nevada, USA.

Two scenarios have been evaluated from work products by a collaboration of independent industry specialist firms including Tetra Tech, Inc., Reserva International, LLC and K-UTEC AG Salt Technologies.

The first is a startup scenario based on mining and processing ore at a design throughput rate of 2,100 (tons here are metric or 2200 lbs) tons per day (13,000 tons per annum lithium carbonate), and second, a full production scenario to double production four years after startup (26,000 tons per annum lithium carbonate).

The study demonstrates that the project could produce lithium carbonate at an estimated average cash cost, net of by-product credits, of $968 per ton once full production of 26,000 tons per year lithium carbonate is achieved. Initial startup capital, including contingency is expected to be approximately $248 million. Incremental development capital to double lithium carbonate production to 26,000 tons per year is estimated at approximately $161 million. Sustaining capital of $40 million including contingency, is primarily composed of surface mine equipment, expansions of dry stack tailings and surface water management, and the mine’s closure.

The startup scenario for lithium carbonate production is expected to commence in 2015 at an annual rate of 13,000 tons per year. Full production of 26,000 tons per year is planned four years after initial startup, if demand for lithium increases.

Optimistic, Chmelauskas takes us further by saying, “Upcoming key milestones for the company include; submission of the Plan of Operations to the Bureau of Land Management initiating the formal permitting process (Q1 2012), starting construction of a lithium carbonate demonstration plant, and commencing work on a definitive feasibility study in 2012. We believe that there is a strong future for electrification and that the Stakeholders of Western Lithium and Nevada can strongly benefit and profit from this industry.”  We all hope the Bureau of Land Management is the only bureaucracy they have to deal with.

The Kings Valley Lithium Project is located in Humboldt County, Nevada, approximately 62 miles north-northwest of Winnemucca along U.S. Highway 95 to Orovada and then 25 miles west-northwest of Orovada, Nevada on paved State Highway 293. Western Lithium has claims that encompass five areas of lithium mineralization.  These five areas are covered by 1,049 Federal unpatented claims over an area of 8,480 hectares.

Mineral Reserves

Kings Valley Ore Reserves
at 0.320% Lithium Cut-off

Note: 95% Mine Recovery Factor Applied. Please see the Company’s additional disclosure of risks and uncertainties surrounding potassium and sodium in its continuous disclosure filings at the company’s website www.westernlithium.com.

The reserve estimate takes into consideration all geologic, mining, processing, and economic factors.

Sharp observers will note the potassium available as well.

Highlights include:

•    Nominal production of by-product potassium sulfate and sodium sulfate of 90,000 and 100,000 tons per year, respectively;
•    20 year mine life, processing 25.5 million tons of ore at an average grade of 0.40% lithium using a 0.320% cut-off grade;

•    The project benefits from established infrastructure including road access, power supply and a local water source;
•    Based on commodity prices of $6,000 per ton lithium carbonate, $600 per ton potassium sulfate, and $75 per ton sodium sulfate;
•    Overall recoveries are expected to be 87.2% for lithium, 77.7% for potassium and 82.7% for sodium.

To measure against those highlights these numbers might be kept in mind:

•    Cash operating costs distributed between the individual products are: lithium carbonate $3,011 per ton, potassium sulfate $87 per ton, sodium sulfate $36 per ton.

Obviously the company expects to do very well.  Even with some lithium price pull down the numbers look pretty good.  That’s a good thing for the economy in North America.

Western Lithium is a Canadian company, which comes at no surprise considering the U.S. economy and the U.S. government’s attitude toward business through regulations and capital controls with the new financial regulation law.  Americans should count their blessings that the lithium was found here and there is a friendly neighbor with their economic act together well enough to get development underway.

Luckily for we writers the conservation of angular momentum is easy to visualize and discuss (simpler Wikipedia page). (Save those emails, just add your voice to the comments.)  By taking some liberty in terms, the conservation is about holding the energy as a mass circles tied to a point.  You can see the conservation as a figure skater draws in the arms and gains rotating speed – the mass has conserved the energy with more speed in a smaller circle – and when the arms come out the energy in the mass is still about the same as the mass travels slower around a larger circle.  Isaac Newton figured this out and set it to mathematics in his second law of mechanics.

What’s happening is an object in motion trying to stay in motion.  A particle going 100 inches a minute in a straight line pulled into a one-inch diameter circle is going to get around 100 times in a minute.  Open the circle up to a 4-inch diameter circle and it will get around 25 times. The impact energy from a particle stop will be the same.  Physics in nature has managed some marvelous examples, the gyroscope stays put; the earth revolves around the sun, the moon around the earth, the whole solar system works and galaxy as well.

The MSU team set out to use the conservation of angular momentum to understand how molecules move energy around following the absorption of light. In the current issue of Science (available in full as a pdf document from MSU), MSU chemist Jim McCusker demonstrates for the first time the effect is real and also suggests how scientists could use it to control and predict chemical reaction pathways in general.

The notion CAM was at work in chemistry was first floated back in 1927 when E. Wigner introduced the notion of spin conservation in chemical reactions where a chemical reaction would be designated “spin-allowed” if the spin angular momentum space spanned by the reactants intersects the spin angular momentum space spanned by the reaction’s products.

CAM in Chemistry Scientists McCusker and Guo. Click image for the largest view. Image Credit: Michigan State University.

Jim McCusker takes us forward with, “The idea has floated around for decades and has been implicitly invoked in a variety of contexts, but no one had ever come up with a chemical system that could demonstrate whether or not the underlying concept was valid. Our result not only validates the idea, but it really allows us to start thinking about chemical reactions from an entirely different perspective.”

McCusker and his team used two closely related molecules that were specifically designed to undergo a chemical reaction known as fluorescence resonance energy transfer, or FRET. Upon absorption of light, the system is predisposed to transfer that energy from one part of the molecule to another.

Then they changed the identity of one of the atoms in the molecule from chromium to cobalt. This altered the molecule’s properties and shut down the reaction. The absence of any detectable energy transfer in the cobalt-containing compound confirmed the hypothesis.

McCusker said, “What we have successfully conducted is a proof-of-principle experiment. One can easily imagine employing these ideas to other chemical processes, and we’re actually exploring some of these avenues in my group right now.”

The team says in the paper, “. . .  it does not appear to us that this formalism should be limited to energy transfer. In principle, a parallel set of expressions for any chemical reaction could be drafted in which consideration of reactant and product angular momenta serves to differentiate various thermodynamically viable pathways. It seems likely that the issues raised herein will manifest more readily in inorganic rather than organic systems because of the broader array of spin states generally accessible in such compounds.”

The expectation here is the use of CAM is going to have immediate application to catalyst research.  The intensity of interest in organic reactions is very high for creating fuels and in solving the catalyst issues in fuel cells.  The documentation of CAM or “spin-allowed” molecules could take off at a furious pace when a few applications are published.

It’s certainly a Happy New Year for the chemists – if they’re up on their calculus and physics.

Erbium Chloride Silicate Ball and Stick Model. Click image for more info.

Arizona State University researchers have created a new crystal material compound called erbium chloride silicate.  Electrical engineering professor Cun-Zheng Ning at ASU says the material can be used to develop the next generations of computers, improve the capabilities of the Internet, increase the efficiency of silicon-based photovoltaic cells to convert sunlight into electrical energy, and enhance the quality of solid-state lighting and sensor technology.

Erbium Metal Sample.

To start, erbium is one of the most important members of the rare earth family in the periodic table of chemical elements. It emits photons in the wavelength range of 1.5 micrometers, which are used in the optical fibers essential to high-quality performance of the Internet and telephones.  Thus, erbium is used in doping optical fibers to amplify the signals of Internet and telephone telecommunications systems.

Next, doping is the term used to describe the process of inserting low concentrations of various elements into other substances as a way to alter the electrical or optical properties of the substances to produce the desired results. The elements used in such processes are referred to as “dopants”.

The ASU breakthrough involves the first-ever synthesis of a new erbium compound in the form of a single-crystal nanowire, which has superior properties compared to erbium compounds in other forms.  Details about the new compound are reported in the Optical Materials Express on the website of the Optical Society of America.

Professor Ning explains, “Since we could not dope as many erbium atoms in a fiber as we wish, fibers had to be very long to be useful for amplifying an Internet signal. This makes integrating Internet communications and computing on a chip very difficult.”

“With the new erbium compound, 1,000 times more erbium atoms are contained in the compound. This means many devices can be integrated into a chip-scale system,” he said. “Thus the new compound materials containing erbium can be integrated with silicon to combine computing and communication functionalities on the same inexpensive silicon platform to increase the speed of computing and Internet operation at the same time.”

The next major application field is solar cells where erbium materials can also be used to increase the energy-conversion efficiency.  Silicon does not absorb solar radiation with wavelengths longer than 1.1 microns, leaving longer wavelengths unused — shorting solar cell efficiency.

Erbium materials can remedy the situation by converting two or more photons of longer wavelengths carrying small amounts of energy into one photon that is carrying a larger amount of energy. The single, more powerful photons can then be absorbed by silicon, thus increasing the efficiency of solar cells.

Part two in solar cells is erbium materials also help absorb ultraviolet light from the sun and convert it into photons carrying small amounts of energy, which can then be more efficiently converted into electricity by silicon cells.

The third industrial application is the color-conversion function of turning ultraviolet light into other visible colors of light that’s important in generating white light for solid-state lighting devices.

Here’s why this matters, as Ning explains further that erbium’s importance is well-recognized, producing erbium materials of high quality has been challenging.  The standard approach is to introduce erbium as a dopant into various host materials, such as silicon oxide, silicon, and many other crystals and glasses.

Ning explains, “One big problem has been that we have not been able to introduce enough erbium atoms into crystals and glasses without degrading optical quality, because too many of these kinds of dopants would cluster, which lowers the optical quality.”

The Ning group solution is synthesizing a new erbium material such that the erbium is no longer randomly introduced as a dopant. Then the erbium is part of a uniform compound and the number of erbium atoms is a factor of 1,000 times more than the maximum amount that can be introduced in other erbium-doped materials.

The effect is the number of erbium atoms provides more optical activity to produce stronger lighting and enhances the conversion of different colors of light into white light to produce higher-quality solid-state lighting and enables solar cells to more efficiently convert sunlight in electrical energy.

Plus erbium atoms are organized in a periodic array, they do not cluster in this new compound, leading one to think that processing and application costs could be reduced.

The Ning group’s story has an interesting start – the synthesis of this new erbium material was made somewhat by accident, “Similar to what other researchers are doing, we were originally trying to dope erbium into silicon nanowires. But the characteristics demonstrated by the material surprised us,” he says. “We got a new material. We did not know what it was, and there was no published document that described it. It took us more than a year to finally realize we got a new single-crystal material no one else had produced.”

Ning and his team are now experimenting to use the new erbium compound for various applications, such as increasing silicon solar cell efficiency and making miniaturized optical amplifiers for chip-scale photonic systems for computers and high-speed Internet fiber and lasers.

“Most importantly,” he says, “there are many things we have yet to learn about what can be achieved with use of the material. Our preliminary studies of its characteristics show it has many amazing properties and superior optical quality. More exciting discoveries are waiting to be made.”

In the U.S. where Internet speeds are far slower than in some other parts of the world this news isn’t so remarkable.  But data volume is growing fast and improved fiber is going to matter sooner than many realize.   Then the solar cell industry still needs to gain technology to reduce costs further, there is a long way to go and if erbium doping pulls more energy for low cost process the improved harvest will help drive more adoption.

Erbium doping isn’t a big issue, but a major improvement in the science will have a big effect on some important big ones.

After more than a decade of research, the team devised a means for developing freestanding, ultra-thin zeolite nanosheets that as thin films can speed up the filtration process and require less energy. The team has a provisional patent and hopes to commercialize the technology.

Zeolite Crystals Buillt As Sheets

Considered a breakthrough, the research led by chemical engineering and materials science professor Michael Tsapatsis in the university’s College of Science and Engineering, has been published in the most recent issue of the journal Science.

Separating mixed substances can require considerable amounts of energy, with current estimates running about 15 percent of the total energy consumption, with much wasted due to process inefficiencies. When fuel was abundant and inexpensive, separation technology was not a major consideration when designing industrial separation processes such as distillation for purifying gasoline and polymer precursors. But as energy prices rise and policies promote efficiency, the need for more energy-efficient alternatives has expanded.

The leading field for more energy-efficient separations is high-resolution molecular separation with membranes.  Membranes perform adsorption and/or sieving of molecules with minute size and shape differences much like a filter.  Among the candidates for selective separation membranes, zeolite materials (crystals with molecular-sized pores) show particular promise.

Zeolites have been used as adsorbents and catalysts for several decades.  But there have been substantial challenges in organizing zeolitic crystal materials into extended sheets that remain intact. To enable energy-savings technology, scientists needed to develop cost-effective, reliable and scalable deposition methods for building thin film zeolite sheets.

The University of Minnesota team’s innovation is to use sound waves in a specialized centrifuge process to develop “carpets” of flaky crystal-type nanosheets that are not only flat, but have just the right amount of thickness. The resulting product can be used to separate molecules as a sieve or as a membrane barrier in both research and industrial applications.

Kumar Varoon, a University of Minnesota chemical engineering and materials science Ph.D. candidate and one of the primary authors of the paper said, “We think this discovery holds great promise in commercial applications. This material has good coverage and is very thin. It could significantly reduce production costs in refineries and save energy.”

Folks in the fuel business have to be cheered up with this news.  In petroleum refining heat is a major cost and consumes a sizable share of the incoming energy to function.  Any substitution that costs less would put the energy back into the market as well, releasing much more fuel to market  In Biofuels an important expense is in separation technology and case for most of the detractors success in complaining about efficiency.  A breakthrough to commercial scale would soon flow across the developed word affecting practically every type of fluid handling in production over time.

The University of Minnesota success is a bigger deal than first glance would suggest.  Just consider the value in separating the main products of oil without heating to hundreds of degrees or producing alcohols without heating for the distillation.  The process effects are considerable too; a filtration step substituted for distillation could make continuous flow more practical than batches.  The impacts are not fully known, but projection suggests a far-reaching impact.

It’s a big group at Minnesota, members of the research team include Ph.D. candidates Kumar Varoon and Xueyi Zhang; postdoctoral fellows Bahman Elyassi and Cgun-Yi Sung; former students and Ph.D. graduates Damien Brewer, Sandeep Kumar, J. Alex Lee and Sudeep Maheshwari, graduate student Anudha Mittal; former undergraduate student Melissa Gettel; and faculty members Matteo Cococcioni, Lorraine Francis, Alon McCormick, K. Andre Mkhoyan and Michael Tsapatsis.

The research is backed by the United States Department of Energy (including the Carbon Sequestration Program and the Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation — An Energy Frontier Center), the National Science Foundation and a variety of University of Minnesota partners.

Step one is finally here, thanks to the folks noted above.