Recent PhD graduate Aaron Palumbo, along with graduate students Scott Rowe and Chubukov, sought a better way.
They swapped cheap, abundant carbon for the silicon reactant and addressed flaws in the production process, landing on a system that requires much less energy. They also managed to extract magnesium continuously, rather than in batches, and eliminated the solid waste commonly formed.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, a division of the U.S. Department of Energy, provided the $3.6 million grant to Weimer’s lab that funded the preliminary research.
The technology could have global economic implications. Metal smelting has increasingly moved overseas, mostly to China, in attempts to reduce the overall cost of manufactured goods. Until the late 1990s, the U.S. was a major world supplier of magnesium, but today, only a single domestic producer remains, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
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[Source”indianexpress”]
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