Symposium Organizers
Martin Green, National Institute of Standards and Technology
Jonathan Cullen, University of Cambridge
William Olson, Seagate Technology
Ashley White, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Symposium Support
National Science Foundation
ES10.01: Materials and Manufacturing Processes
Session Chairs
Elsa Olivetti
Ashley White
Monday PM, November 27, 2017
Hynes, Level 3, Room 303
8:30 AM - *ES10.01.01
Material Use Patterns and Climate Change—Moving Forward
Timothy Gutowski 1
1 , Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Show AbstractMaterials usage plays an outsized role in climate change due to the high energy use and carbon emissions from production. In fact, materials production dominates the global manufacturing sector in these two environmental categories. Paradoxically, solving this problem involves both the increased production of energy intensive materials, and the decreased production of materials with low energy intensity. But perhaps the biggest conundrum is the strong connection between materials production and economic development. The way forward is not to proselytize one solution over another, but to understand the complex nature of the problem and to move forward in a balanced and informed way. This talk will focus on the nature of the real conflicts involved in various proposals to reduce the carbon emissions and energy use from the materials production sector. Examples include the benefits and limitations of the Circular Economy, the tensions between longer and shorter lifecycles for products (both of these actively being discussed in the EU), as well as comments on Material Efficiency and Material Demand Reduction, (both are proposals we have developed with other colleagues in recent publications). This talk will be framed in the context of global scale material usage and discuss the challenges of interpreting the global scale implications of local scale interventions.
9:00 AM - ES10.01.02
Material Demand Reduction and Closed-Loop Recycling Automotive Aluminium
Philippa Horton 1 , Julian Allwood 1 , Paul Cassell 2 , Christopher Edwards 2 , Adrian Tautscher 2
1 , University of Cambridge, Cambridge United Kingdom, 2 , Jaguar Land Rover, Coventry United Kingdom
Show AbstractEnvironmentally aware automotive manufacturers close-loop recycle aluminium production scrap to generate environmental and financial savings. Further savings could be gained if material demand is reduced, through improving the material efficiency of the production process. Since a more efficient production process generates less scrap, the opportunity for closed-loop recycling reduces when material demand reduces. This paper investigates the interaction between material demand reduction and closed-loop recycling for an aluminium intensive case-study vehicle. It identifies the greatest environmental and financial savings when both strategies are implemented together. It is shown that a ‘recycled content’ target does not capture these saving opportunities. It is recommended that automotive manufacturers set targets for material efficiency and scrap recovery, to simultaneously promote closed-loop recycling and material demand reduction.
9:15 AM - ES10.01.03
Strategies to Reduce the Emissions of the Building Stock in the United Kingdom
Andre Serrenho 1 , Simon Davies 1 , Michal Drewniok 1 , Cyrille Dunant 1 , Julian Allwood 1
1 , University of Cambridge, Cambridge United Kingdom
Show AbstractFuel combustion and industrial processes are responsible for more than two-thirds of anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions worldwide. The International Energy Agency estimates that buildings alone accounted for 31% of global combustion emissions in 2013, due to their energy requirements. In the UK, buildings have been responsible for an average of 27% of emissions over the last decade, as around 45% of final energy uses took place in buildings. In 2015, 64% of the energy consumption in UK buildings was used for the sole purpose of space heating or cooling. Such a large proportion of emissions associated to buildings highlights the need to understand the opportunities for emissions savings in buildings. Identifying these opportunities is essential to prioritise investments and to inform policy-makers.
Current literature characterises recent trends in energy uses in buildings and examines the influence of building functions, urbanisation and retrofitting measures on energy uses. In the UK, comprehensive databases characterise energy uses in buildings, such as the Homes Energy Efficiency Database and the Building Energy Efficiency Survey for non-domestic buildings. However, an assessment of the total emissions performance of buildings is often difficult to estimate and to correlate with building functions, type of construction and age. Furthermore, there is currently a weak understanding of the GHG emissions produced during the construction phase, and how these compare with the operational emissions of buildings and their longevity. A better characterisation of the composition of material stocks of buildings by function, type of construction and age is therefore required to define priorities aimed at reducing the emissions produced by buildings.
In this analysis, we characterise the composition of the building stock in the UK, and estimate their emissions performance (GHG per floor area) by building function, type of construction, and age, considering both construction and operation phases. This is accomplished by using a dynamic material flow analysis to characterise material stocks in UK buildings, based on existing databases, official statistics, and interviews to practitioners across the UK construction supply chain. Construction emissions are estimated by considering the material composition of the stock and appropriate material production intensities. Operational emissions are estimated by comparing the composition of the building stock with corresponding energy uses by floor area, building function, type of construction, and age.
The results help to identify strategies that promote emissions savings in the building stock in terms of: material choice, the dynamics of retrofitting over constructing of new buildings, and the impacts of lifetime on emissions performance.
9:30 AM - ES10.01.04
Round and Round We Go—Measuring The Circularity of Material Cycles
Jonathan Cullen 1
1 Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, Cambridge United Kingdom
Show AbstractA circular economy is one that is restorative and regenerative by design and aims to keep products, components, and materials at their highest utility and value at all times . . . ” (EMF 2015). However, many studies of the circular economy overlook the additional material and energy inputs required to make closed material loops go around. Material recycling is promoted vigorously by policy makers and environmental groups, based on the assumption that recycling always benefits the environment. However, in practice, the loss of material and the energy required to restore material quality frequently outweighs the benefits. Proponents of the circular economy sidestep this reality, adopting the convenient solution that all energy inputs can be derived from renewable sources. This premise is not only far from the current reality - renewables only contribute around 5% of current energy supply - but such a renewable future would benefit both linear and circular economies. What is needed, is a rigorous measure of circularity that considers both the materials and energy implications of material cycles. In this research, we propose a Circularity Index (CI) which assesses both the quantity and quality of materials in cycled loops. The metric is applied to five energy-intensive materials: steel, concrete, plastic, paper and aluminium. For all five materials, the CI lies well below (C<0.2) the perfect circularity (CI=1) indicating that much effort is still required to transition to a circular economy. The results suggest that more detailed systems analysis of material and energy flows are required, including a deeper understanding of the practical and thermodynamic limits of circularity.
References
EMF (Ellen MacArthur Foundation). 2015. Towards a circular economy: Business rationale for an accelerated transition. www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org.
10:15 AM - *ES10.01.05
System and Technology Investigations on the Beneficial Use of Industrial Byproducts
Elsa Olivetti 1
1 , MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Show AbstractThis talk describes work to process industrial byproducts into alternative cementitious (and cementitious-like) materials. The existence of significant amounts of industrial byproducts has renewed interest in developing strategies for economically feasible and environmentally beneficial use in order to reduce the impact associated with the disposal of these materials (and potentially displace primary materials use). Due to the wide variation in the composition, quantity, source location, and morphology of these flows, the beneficial use of these materials typically suffers from ‘down cycling’. This research aims to transform waste aluminosilicate materials into value-added binders using thermo-chemical treatment. This talk will cover work to: a) characterize the chemical composition and morphology of these waste aluminosilicate materials, b) develop alkali activated and geopolymerized products from these wastes for use in the built environment, and c) evaluate the thermal performance, economic, and environmental impact of these materials in the built environment.
10:45 AM - ES10.01.06
3D Printing and the Circular Economy
Rigoberto Advincula 1
1 , Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, United States
Show AbstractThe progress towards high efficiency processes and production can be demonstrated as advantageous if it results in lowering of energy usage and decrease in waste or repurposing of generated products and by-products. Additive manufacturing and 3D printing are synonymous with rapid prototyping and production in limited quantities of or more complex parts and design. Can 3D printing be an important component of Industry 4.0? Will it replace traditional high throughput manufacturing? What are the materials challenges? Polymers and metals are the materials of primary interest. While there is a lot of interest for the biomedical field, it is also possible to focus recent advances that will go towards aerospace and automotive light-weighting. Another important aspect of 3D printing is distributed production and digital manufacturing that can cross traditional block chain supply models and distribution. This talk will outline and review important developments and the value chain of 3D printing towards the following: 1) Challenges of adopting the right 3D printing methods and the intricate relationship with the starting material and desired parte properties, 2) Savings in time, cost, and reduction of waste materials in 3D printing, 3) Unique applications of 3D printing and replacement of traditional manufacturing modes towards high performance and limited production, and lastly 4) Bio-inspired and design paradigms towards high strength and lightweight materials from aerospace to biomaterials. The talks will also highlight our work employing fused deposition modeling (FDM), selective laser sintering (SLS), and stereo lithographic apparatus (SLA) or photopolymerized fabrication of nanocomposite materials.
11:00 AM - ES10.01.07
Development of High-Performance Reverse Osmosis Membranes for Energy-Efficient Desalination
Hiroki Minehara 1 , Harutoki Shimura 1 , Takafumi Ogawa 1 , Takao Sasaki 1 , Masahiro Kimura 1
1 , Toray Industries, Inc., Shiga Japan
Show AbstractReverse osmosis (RO) membranes have gained popularity in water treatment plants around the world for addressing water shortage problems. There has been an increasing demand for enhancing water production rate of the membranes to carry out the process with low energy. Improvement the solute rejection rate and durability of RO membranes is an also important issue to ensure consistent supply of high quality water.
Structural analysis and control of the membranes are the keys to the improvement of the performance. Typical RO membranes have composite structures. Cross-linked aromatic polyamide functional layer, which is formed on supporting membrane, affords separation properties. The functional layer has sub-μm-size protuberance structures and sub-nm-size pores. Detailed analysis and design of these structures are important to the development of RO membranes with high performance.
In our past work, pores were found to be strongly correlated to the removal capability of solutes, using positron annihilation lifetime spectroscopy (PALS). PALS results are confirmed to be in good agreement with molecular dynamics simulation. The morphology of protuberance structures was quantitatively examined by advanced TEM technology, such as TEM tomography. The relationships between membrane performance and the surface area, thickness, and uniformity of protuberance structures were successfully revealed through the utilization of the analyses.
Based on the above results, energy-efficient RO membranes with high solute rejection were successfully developed by the precise control of the fine pores and the morphology. These membranes are thought to be suitable for mega (1,000,000 m3/day) RO plants, where reduction of energy is an important subject.
11:15 AM - ES10.01.08
Application of EDS to Facilitate Water Free Cleaning of Solar Power Generation
Ryan Eriksen 1 , Aykut Turkoglu 1 , Annie Rabi Bernard 1 , Cristian Morales 1 , Malay Mazumder 1 , Nitin Joglekar 1 , Mark Horenstein 1
1 , Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Show AbstractOne aspect of solar power generation that is often overlooked is the high water consumption necessary to clean the optical surfaces of both photovoltaic (PV) panels and concentrated solar power (CSP) mirrors. Dust deposition results in a gradual decrease of a solar plants generation output by 1% to 15% per month, depending on the geographical location. The result is the need for periodic cleaning. The standard industry practice is deluge washing, in which large volumes of water are mixed with detergent and used to restore the optical surface. This may limit the potential of solar power generation in arid climates, where water is scarce but solar irradiance is abundant. Alternative methods such as passive coatings still require water to remove dust and have poor longevity, while robotic cleaning methods reduce water consumption but increase installation and maintenance costs and therefore do not significantly affect the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE). If solar power is going to grow to the levels that it is projected to be needed, a water free method of cleaning will be required.
The Electrodynamic Screen (EDS) can help maintain the optical surface of either PV panels or CSP mirrors by removing the dust that is deposited naturally due to the weather. The EDS consists of rows of interdigitated, parallel electrodes which are used to generate an electric field. This field first charges and then lifts the dust from the surface. By alternating the field to create a traveling wave, the dust is then swept from the optical surface without the use of water. This cleaning method can significantly reduce the use of water and restore the power output generation of PV panels to 95.5% and the specular reflectance of CSP mirrors to 88.9%, as measured by output power restoration (OPR) and specular reflectance restoration (SRR), respectively. For an annual water use benchmark case of 134.8 million gallons, the EDS design reduces water consumption to 34.1 gallons, which is the equivalent of a 74.7% savings annually.
The goal of the EDS is to reduce the water usage of solar power plants and therefore the cost of cleaning. This will decrease the LCOE for solar power in order to make it more economically competitive while making the technology more sustainable. We report on the design, construction, and evaluation of self-cleaning EDS films and will discuss the status of the EDS, including economic models and water reduction calculations.
11:30 AM - ES10.01.09
Silicon Nanoparticles—An Economic and Sustainable Production Route of Raw Materials for Battery Applications
Sophie Schnurre 1 , Margherita Cioffi 2 , Tim Huelser 1
1 , Institute of Energy and Environmental Technology e.V. (IUTA), Duisburg Germany, 2 Research & Innovation, Rina Consulting S.p.A., Rome Italy
Show AbstractRapidly developing markets such as energy harvesting and storage, advanced materials for aerospace, electronics and environmental remediation are potential key applications for nanomaterials (NM). Impacts range from increased efficiency of energy harvesting or storage batteries to radical improvements in mechanical properties for construction materials. In addition, concerns of these markets such as scarcity of materials, cost, security of supply and negative environmental impact of older products could also be addressed by new nano-enabled materials.
During the ongoing FP7 EU project FutureNanoNeeds (FNN), the production, classification, hazard and environmental impact assessment of the next generation NMs prior to their widespread industrial use is studied. As an example material, we chose silicon nanoparticles, since this material is a candidate for anode material in lithium batteries because of its high storage capacity , good availability of raw material, cheap production method and its sufficient long-term stability.
In this work we demonstrate the formation of silicon nanomaterial by homogeneous gas-phase reactions as a direct and highly economic way to produce the required high-purity raw material for battery applications. Furthermore, we will present an economic and sustainable production strategy with respect to sophisticated material properties. Subsequently, we developed a value chain for lithium ion battery materials with respect to market, patent and literature analyses as well as the innovation potential. Here, the synthesis process, the manufacturing, the use phase and the end of life phase are taken into account.
Together, these tools will form the basis of a “value chain” regulatory process, which allows battery related NM to be assessed for different applications on the basis of available data and the specific exposure and life cycle concerns for that application. The main objective of this assessment is to identify specific areas of concern in the nanomaterial life cycle which can be relate to substantial release or exposure and hot spots where a transformation of the material is expected.
Furthermore, we generated data sheets to gather information along the value chain during production, use and recycling. Different kinds of potential battery related materials were identified and their technical properties were listed. To determine the technology readiness level (TRL) of the lithium ion battery technology a scheme has been worked out, which shows a timeline that is divided into laboratory-, pilot plant- and industrial-scale from today to 2030. Technology related topics such as material, processing, component development, assembly and the final product are integrated into scheme. Technology options like social and economic chances as well as limitations like risk potential, social risks and barriers to economic growth are considered.
11:45 AM - ES10.01.10
A Spatially Explicit Assessment of Water Use by the Global Semiconductor Industry
Kali Frost 1 , Inez Hua 1 2
1 Division of Environmental and Ecological Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, United States, 2 Lyles School of Civil Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, United States
Show AbstractThe semiconductor industry provides data processing and memory for computers, cars, phones, and many other electronic products, and is vital to the global economy. This industry is rapidly evolving, in accordance with Moore’s law, and new semiconductor fabrication facilities (fabs) and production lines are being constructed at a high rate. High purity materials and purified water and air in a clean room environment are required to meet semiconductor specifications and previous assessments of this industry have shown that these processes require a large amount of water (e.g. Intel withdraws 6 billion gallons per year at its U.S. fabs). Characterizing the use of natural resources such as water in existing manufacturing processes is a vital step towards developing more resource efficient processes and appropriate remediation and mitigation strategies.
Industry trends indicate growth in semiconductor manufacturing in Taiwan, South Korea, and China. To ascertain the impact of an increasing demand and shift in water use by the industry, this project will utilize worldwide semiconductor fab capacity data along with previous estimates of water use per chip (by relevant technology node) to estimate water use by facility. A simplified water stress assessment will be conducted by multiplying facility water use data by a water scarcity factor at various spatial scales. Water stress or water scarcity is the ratio of water demand to total water availability for a given area, or the ‘potential of water deprivation’ for humans or ecosystems.
A watershed based water scarcity characterization factor is provided by the AWaRe (Available Water Remaining) index. The AWaRE index utilizes data from the WaterGAP model which implements a global hydrology model and a study simulating global industrial and domestic water use. The AWaRE index is calculated by assessing water availability minus demand by humans and aquatic ecosystems, per area, and by month. Maps displaying the water stress assessment data will help locate regions of potential concern and will be utilized to identify current or planned facilities with the highest potential water use impact. We will then use the water use life cycle assessment (WULCA) method known as water footprinting to conduct a detailed inventory of water use per chip from semiconductor manufacturers in selected high impact areas. A water footprint is a group of water related impact categories that measure the amount of fresh water consumed or polluted by a product over its life span. Our assessment will focus primarily on the semiconductor manufacturing life stage, which is the second largest user of water after the use stage (due to the water-energy nexus). This assessment will be used in future work to quantify damages from water deprivation on human health, ecosystem quality, and water resources.
ES10.02: Educational and Outreach Activities
Session Chairs
Monday PM, November 27, 2017
Hynes, Level 3, Room 303
1:30 PM - *ES10.02.01
Analysing and Measuring Circularity—Teaching and Industrial Tools by Granta Design
Tatiana Vakhitova 1 , Marc Fry 1
1 , Granta Design Ltd, Cambridge United Kingdom
Show AbstractCircular economy (CE) is closely linked with the ideas of a low-carbon economy, management of supply risks, value generation through the service-based economy and efficient resource management. CE implies a design that focusses on material legacy, creating an economy that retains or regenerates materials over many life cycles, hence not consuming but using materials (Ashby 2016, EMF 2015).
How can we measure the transition from a linear to more circular economy? To quantify circularity at the product-level, Granta and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF) developed a metric – the Material Circularity Indicator (MCI), which concentrates on mass flow. It aids assessment of the circularity at a product and a company level (EMF & Granta Design 2015). The MCI is “perhaps the most ambitious attempt yet to develop a product-level circularity metric” (Linder et al., 2017). The MCI of a product, for instance, measures how much more efficient the material flow of its component materials is in terms of their longevity and intensity of use, compared to an industrial average (EMF and Granta Design: 2015). This collaborative project on Circular Economy Metrics (LIFE+) between EMF and Granta Design has informed further development in other Granta tools used in academia and industry. The MI:Product Intelligence™ package integrates MCI and enables evaluation of a range of environmental, regulatory and supply chain risks.
The Eco Audit Tool[1] supports the introduction of the concepts of circular economy and is widely used in teaching design and engineering courses, as well as in industrial design project work. Its methodology is particularly useful at the conceptual design stage and is comparable with a streamlined life-cycle inventory. The Eco Audit Tool enables the running of scenarios with different feedstock, processing, and end-of-life (EoL) options (including reuse). The Eco Audit analyses draw on the data on materials and processes available in the vast databases of the software and on the bill of materials from users. The visual outputs present estimated energy use, CO2 emissions and costs at each stage of the product life. The warning indicators for toxic substances and critical materials help in the process of material selection for product design projects.
This talk will demonstrate Granta’s approach to circularity through case studies applying its tools, which aid teaching of engineering and design courses and help industrial decisions around the world.
References:
Ashby, M.F., Balas, D. F. and Coral, J.S. 2016. Materials and Sustainable Development. Butterworth-Heinemann Publishing.
Ellen MacArthur Foundation and Granta Design, 2015. Circularity Indicators. An Approach to Measuring Circularity. Project Overview. Available on-line.
Linder, M., Sarasini, S. and Van Loon, P. 2017. A Metric for Quantifying Product-Level Circularity, Journal for Industrial Ecology 21(3): 545–558.
[1] Part of Granta’s CES EduPack and CES Selector http://www.grantadesign.com
2:00 PM - ES10.02.02
Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) Site—Sustainable Electronics
Inez Hua 1 , Matthew Korey 1
1 , Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, United States
Show AbstractResults from a unique teacher development program that leverages the expertise of engineering scholars at Purdue University and Tuskegee University through the RET Site: Sustainable Electronics are presented. High school science teachers in Indiana and Alabama were trained for six weeks during the summer and were provided with an intensive research experience with graduate student and faculty mentors. A series of professional development activities were held in conjunction with the research, including field trips, demonstrations about electronics and materials engineering, presentations from members of the Industrial Advisory Board, and presentations about engineering design. The teachers were provided with funding and support to implement new, standard-based curricula in their science courses at their respective high schools. Results from two teacher cohorts (2016 and 2017) are presented, including research project results and the developed high school curricula. The mentoring experiences of both the graduate student and the faculty mentors are also discussed.
From the 22 research projects that were pursued by researchers during the two summers of this program, a selection were chosen for further analysis. For example, three projects from the first cohort are focused on materials in electronics. The first project was on the topic of tannic acid as a biologically-sourced brominated flame retardant alternative in epoxy systems, the second involved discovering the most effective method through which boron nitride particles could be surface functionalized with dopamine, and the third was to determine the impact of brominated flame retardants and their replacements on ecosystems and human health using quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) modeling. The teachers who studied these topics were challenged to consider how human activities changed the flow of matter in an ecosystem, to understand the chemistry involved in the synthesis of chemicals that alleviate this problem, and to utilize computational methods to determine whether such chemicals actually lowered environmental impacts of human activities. The teachers developed methods to bring these projects back into the classroom, based on Indiana or Alabama science standards, to provide their students with a unique experience with applied materials engineering. Other examples of research projects and high school curricula are also discussed.
Based on teachers’ self-reported data, approximately 1,293 students in the states of Indiana and Alabama received instruction related to sustainability, chemistry, governmental policy, or environmental impact of electronics disposal during the 2016-2-17 school year, as a result of the RET program. Classroom activities included field trips, research papers, public symposia, and interaction with public officials, and field sampling and analysis. Additional students experienced the curricula developed by the second cohort of RET participants.
2:15 PM - ES10.02.03
Developing Students’ Understanding of Life Cycle Inventory and Sustainability—A Polyethylene Terephthalate and Polyethylene Furanoate Case Study
Zhibo Yuan 1 , Cameron Feriante 1 , Elsa Reichmanis 1 , Mahmood Sabahi 1
1 , Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, United States
Show AbstractLife cycle inventory (LCI) studies have become an increasingly important methodology for assessment of environmental impacts of chemical/materials products and processes. These methodologies are becoming the integral components of the circular economy, and are used by the decision makers across the enterprise. It is essential for chemists and chemical engineers who will be involved in all segments of the enterprise to understand the fundamentals of life cycle inventory assessment and learn to apply the methodologies in the development of new products, new technologies, and new processes.
Hence, training future leaders to understand LCI assessment is critical for effective research, business, and sociopolitical decision-making. Performing an LCI assessment on materials is time consuming and the choices and assumptions made during system modeling - especially with respect to the system boundaries, manufacturing processes, supply chain, and geography - will influence the outcome of the LCI study. In this presentation, we discuss the methodology that we applied for the life cycle inventory study of two major commodity polymers—polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polyethylene furanoate (PEF)—that are used for manufacturing plastic packaging, synthetic fibers, and many other consumer products. We will also present major learning outcomes, challenges that we faced, and the opportunities for applying this methodology to serve as a useful teaching tool for chemistry, chemical engineering and materials science students.
Keywords: life cycle inventory, polyethylene terephthalate, polyethylene furanoate
ES10.03: Sustainable Sourcing and Substitution of Materials
Session Chairs
Monday PM, November 27, 2017
Hynes, Level 3, Room 303
3:00 PM - *ES10.03.01
Critical Materials Implications from the Internet of Things (IOT)—What Happens if Emerging Data Storage Materials are Implemented in Data Centers at Mass Scale?
Anthony Ku 1
1 , NICE, Mountain View, California, United States
Show AbstractOver the past decade, raw material price spikes have called attention to the supply security of a variety of critical materials, including rhenium, rare earth elements, and helium. While market forces play an important role in creating and resolving these situations, transitions in technology also create step-changes in demand that increase or decrease the criticality of different materials. With an appropriate understanding of how materials are used in various applications, it is possible to explore the critical materials implications associated with the introduction of new technologies. Work is already underway to investigate the materials impacts of emerging clean energy technologies related to solar power and energy storage. Rapid technological change is also being enabled by information technologies and the Internet of Things (IOT). Here, less work has been done around materials trends and their implications. This presentation discusses a specific case study around emerging technologies for data storage and what their implementation in data centers at mass scale might mean for existing supply chains and market dynamics for certain critical materials.
3:30 PM - ES10.03.02
Tannic Acid as a Halogen-Free Flame Retardant for Thermoplastic and Epoxy Materials
John Howarter 1 , Matthew Korey 1 , Jeffrey Youngblood 1
1 , Purdue Univ, West Lafayette, Indiana, United States
Show AbstractDesigning new sustainable materials, which can be integrated into existing electronics manufacturing, can focus on materials from sustainable feedstocks or enabling value-recovery at the end-of-life. Here we discuss research efforts aimed at creating and characterizing next generation materials for sustainable electronics. New functional polymer formulations, which reduce the need for halogenated additives have been developed for use as circuit boards or as packaging/casings. Tannic acid (TA) is a biologically-based, polyphenolic compound found in a wide variety of trees, plants, seeds, nuts, and galls all around the world. Its use as an antioxidant and a chelating agent is well known, and it has been studied in a wide variety of polymer systems as a flame-retardant additive. However, there is limited research on TA as an additive in epoxy due to the mismatch in compatibility between the hydrophilic TA molecule and hydrophobic epoxy matrix. In our work, we explore TA as a functional crosslinker in epoxy to develop a novel TA-hardened single component epoxy material, and chemically, thermally, and mechanically characterize this new material as a more environmentally-friendly epoxy alternative. In this study, TA was both dispersed up to 10 weight percent in triethylene tetramine (TETA) cross-linked epoxy samples and, with an increase in temperature, was used as a chemical cross-linker with dispersion up to 40 weight percent. TETA and TA cross-linked epoxy samples were characterized for their compatibility, thermal stability, mechanical properties, and thermomechanical properties. It was found that TA cross-linked epoxy samples had significantly increased mechanical properties, glass transition temperatures, and thermal stability as compared to TETA cross-linked samples, therefore making this new epoxy material desirable in higher-temperature and weight-bearing applications while eliminating the need for halogenated additives.
3:45 PM - *ES10.03.03
Challenges in Sustainable Sourcing—Intel's Journey
Carolyn Duran 1
1 , Intel Corporation, Hillsboro, Oregon, United States
Show AbstractHistorically, many companies have primarily focused on the environmental aspects of sustainability such as emissions, chemical management, and waste streams. While these are critically important, they are not the full picture. To truly address challenges in sustainable development, companies must look at the triple bottom line, covering not only the environment, but also society and economy. This paper will start with a focus on the business case for driving sustainable development in all three areas, with a focus on supply chain and sustainable sourcing. We will then hone in on two specific examples: responsible sourcing of minerals, and addressing labor issues in developing countries. Intel’s responsible mineral sourcing program started with the straightforward but seemingly impossible goal of delivering conflict-free supply chains in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Egregious human rights issues have been committed for decades in the Congo, and partial funding of these come from the illicit trade of tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold, all critical materials to semiconductor products. This paper will share Intel’s engagement to work collectively through the supply chain to define and implement systems and processes to responsibly source minerals from this region. Then, we will touch on how new technical innovations can drive significant increases in demand for new minerals, and the risks related to relying on an informal, artisanal mining sector. We will then turn our focus to labor issues, and provide example of programs, progress and challenges in forced and bonded labor and working hours. Finally, we will discuss the seventeen United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, share Intel’s current engagement across these, and propose a few key areas where Materials Research can play a role.
4:15 PM - ES10.03.04
Irradiated Recycled Plastic as a Concrete Additive for Improved Chemo-Mechanical Properties and Lower Carbon Footprint
Carolyn Schaefer 1 , Kunal Kupwade-Patil 1 , Michael Ortega 1 , Carmen Soriano 2 , Oral Buyukozturk 1 , Anne White 1 , Michael Short 1
1 , MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, 2 , Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, Illinois, United States
Show AbstractGreenhouse gas emissions are major negative consequences of Portland based cement production. Thus a need exists for the development of durable and sustainable concrete with a lower carbon footprint. This can be achieved when Portland cement is partially replaced with another material without compromising the concrete’s strength. The utilization of waste plastics in concrete has been explored as a means of improving concrete’s mechanical properties while also providing an efficient way to both repurpose waste plastic and partially displace cement for the purpose of reducing carbon emissions. This replacement, however, is typically accompanied by a sacrifice of compressive strength. This work discusses the design for and progress toward a high-strength concrete with a dense cementious matrix that contains an irradiated plastic additive. Cement samples containing various combinations of cement binder and plastic content were prepared; compressive strength tests showed that for all cement binder types, the addition of high dose irradiated plastic resulted in increased compressive strength as compared to the strengths achieved by samples with regular, non-irradiated plastic. This suggests that irradiating plastic at a high dose is a viable potential solution for gaining some of the strength back that is lost when plastic is added to concrete. To assess the internal structure of the samples and gain some insight into what aspects of their chemical compositions’ contributed to the observed strength differences, a microstructural analysis—consisting of XRD, SEM, and X-ray microtomography was performed. XRD analysis showed that various discrepancies in C-S-H and C-A-S-H phase formation from the addition of both irradiated plastic and mineral additives helped to form high density phases that contributed to higher relative strengths. BSE analysis showed that an increased alumina content among fly ash samples helped to form the high-density phases that contributed to higher relative strength among the fly ash samples, as evidenced through a ternary phase diagram. X-ray microtomography showed that the addition of high dose irradiated plastic consistently contributed to a decrease in segmented porosity, indicating that irradiated plastic may have acted as a pore-blocking agent. The results presented clearly show the benefit of using irradiated plastic as a concrete additive for improved compressive strength. By partially replacing Portland cement with a repurposed waste material, this design, when scaled to the level of mass concrete production, could contribute to reduced carbon emissions and provide a long-term solution for waste plastic storage. Thus it aims to introduce a potential cement production system that would both improve the efficiency of cement manufacture and allow for the reuse of waste materials.
ES10.04: Poster Session
Session Chairs
Jonathan Cullen
Ashley White
Tuesday AM, November 28, 2017
Hynes, Level 1, Hall B
8:00 PM - ES10.04.01
Highly Selective Ethylene Tetramerization with Metal-Organic Framework MIL-100(Fe)
Yang Han 1 , Ying Zhang 1 , Achao Cheng 1 , Guangliang Feng 1
1 , China University of Petroleum, Beijing China
Show AbstractIntroduction: Nonlinear C8 hydrocarbons, like iso-octane, can raise the octane rating of gasoline due to its better anti-knock characteristics, allowing the use of higher compress ion ratios and higher thermal efficiencies. The benefits of nonlinear C8 addition to gasoline have always been recognized for practical reasons. Fischer-Tropsch process and isomerization reaction have been explored to produce nonlinear C8 hydrocarbons by using different types of catalysts such as classical zeolites, metal oxides for commercially applied process. Olefin oligomerization on these catalysts has also been reported to harvest nonlinear C8 hydrocarbons. However, the reaction temperature above 100 oC is relatively high, demanding high energy-consumption. Metal-organic Frameworks (MOFs) with coordinated unsaturated sites (CUSs) on late-transition metals have often been researched as desiccant and adsorbent, and are reported being tested in gas-phase olefin dimerization, indicating the MOF materials take the potential value in the application of oligomerization. Herein, highly selective ethylene tetramerization is observed on a Metal-Organic Framework, MIL-100(Fe) under mild conditions to obtain nonlinear C8 hydrocarbons.
Methodology: MIL-100(Fe) was synthesized and vacuum treated at different temperatures to obtain MIL-100(Fe) catalysts with CUSs. Then the treated MIL-100(Fe) catalysts were utilized in ethylene slurry oligomerization.
Results: All the MIL-100(Fe) catalysts show high selective tetramerization activities. Specifically, the catalytic activity of the catalyst treated under 250 oC reaches over 1.27×105 g/(molFe.h) and the selectivity for C8 is more than 70% under 10 atm at ambient temperature. There is almost 90% nonlinear C8 tetramers components in the obtained tetramers.
Conclusion: The operation of ethylene tetramerization on MIL-100(Fe) is more easily realized at mild conditions, which is an energy-efficient procedure. And the tetramers products containing nonlinear C8 components are suitable as the addition to gasoline to increase the octane number.
8:00 PM - ES10.04.02
Effects of Li2CO3 Addition on Microstructure and Thermal Properties of Porous MgTi2O5 Ceramics
Xinzhu Miao 1 , Yoshikazu Suzuki 1
1 , University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba Japan
Show AbstractMagnesium dititanate (MT2) ceramics with pseudobrookite structure are produced by sintering mixed powders of MgCO3 (basic) and TiO2 at the temperature of 1000-1200°C. MgTi2O5 ceramics have relatively low thermal expansion and good thermal shock resistance among pseudobrookite-type compounds. Due to these good properties, they are expected to be used as diesel particulate filters (DPF) in passenger cars or trucks. In order to increase the pore size and improve the coefficient of thermal expansion of MT2 ceramics, the effects of Li2CO3 additive on microstructure and thermal properties of MT2 ceramics are investigated. At the same time, we are trying to make a gas flow system to characterize the particulate matter (PM) collection efficiency of honeycomb MT2 ceramics.
The raw materials used to prepare MgTi2O5 ceramics were MgCO3 (basic) and TiO2 anatase powders on a molar ratio of 1:2. Then Li2CO3 additive with different amount (0.1 wt.%, 0.5 wt.%, 1.0 wt.%, 2.0 wt.%, 4.0 wt.%) were doped into mixtures respectively to prepare different compound powders. The powders with different addition amount were thoroughly mixed through wet ball milling for about 24 h and dried at 80°C overnight. The dried powders were then sieved through a 150-mesh screen in order to obtain the same average particle-sizes each powder. The mixed powders were then uniaxially pressed into rectangular bars of 50 mm×6 mm×6 mm at the pressure of 18 MPa for 1 min. After pressing, the samples with different Li2CO3 content were sintered at 1100°C in air for 2 h to obtain porous MgTi2O5 bars. Analysis of phases was performed with X-ray diffraction. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) was used to observe the microstructure of MT2 ceramics. Thermomechanical analysis (TMA) experiments were carried out to compare the coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) of different powders.
Volume shrinkage was observed due to Li2CO3 additive during reactive sintering. The bulk density increased when increasing the Li2CO3 content. Li2CO3-doping is an effective way to enhance bulk density with appropriate content. Grain growth can be obviously seen when adding 1.0 wt.%. Appropriate Li2CO3 doping promoted uniform and large grains. However coefficient of thermal expansion of Li2CO3 doped MT2 ceramics decreased obviously over 900°C due to the second sintering reaction. In conclusion, the optimum application requirement of Li2CO3 doped MgTi2O5 ceramics is less than 900°C.
8:00 PM - ES10.04.03
Nanocrystallization Behavior of Rare-Metal-Free Ferrous Amorphous Mono-Dispersed Particles Prepared by Container-Less Solidification Process
Noriharu Yodoshi 1 , Rui Yamada 1 , Akira Kawasaki 1
1 , Tohoku University, Sendai Japan
Show AbstractBecause of the urgent worldwide demand for energy-saving measures, miniaturized electrical equipment with improved energy efficiency are needed. Fe-based amorphous materials, including metallic glasses have recently attracted significant attention due to their high magnetic susceptibility, very low coercivity, and low core loss over a wide frequency range. Recently, materials containing a high density of fine nanocrystalline α-Fe grains within the amorphous matrix have been developed and are expected to be utilized for industrial applications such as in inductors and motor cores. However, it has not been possible so far to clearly establish the relationship between the magnetic properties of nonequilibrium materials and the nanostructure of their inner grains.
In this study, we aim to prepare Fe76Si9B10P5 metallic glassy particles with high homogeneity and a small number of nucleation sites, by the container-less solidification process called pulsated orifice ejection method (POEM). In addition, we aim to investigate the effects of nanocrystallization on saturation magnetization by measuring the magnetic properties of a single particle. With this method, the number of inner nucleation sites is reduced, resulting in nanocrystalline grains with improved homogeneity after annealing under optimized conditions.
Monodispersed Fe76Si9B10P5 particles with a high sphericity and approximately 500 µm diameters were successfully prepared by the POEM. All obtained monodispersed particles, with various diameters, were identified to be composed of a single glassy or amorphous phase, by X-ray diffraction and DSC thermal analyses. The annealing induced the nanocrystallization of α-Fe and Fe-B compounds. We could confirm by TEM observations that the proportion of the different crystalline phases formed was dependent on the annealing temperature. Soft magnetic properties of as-quenched and heat-treated particles were evaluated by using a vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM) with a single particle. The saturation magnetization increased with increasing annealing temperatures until a certain temperature due to the α-Fe precipitation, and it subsequently deteriorated due to the transformation of the α-Fe to Fe-B compound phases. The saturation magnetization of the single particles was higher than that of the ribbon samples prepared by the conventional single roll method. This was attributable to the higher homogeneity of the nanocrystalline grains of the former as well as their higher α-Fe to Fe-B compound phase ratio.
8:00 PM - ES10.04.04
Nanoalloys—Advanced Catalysts for Catalytic Reduction of NOx
Shiyao Shan 1 , Kelli Moseman 1 , Haval Kareem 1 , Hannah Cronk 1 , Jing Li 1 , Fang Lin 1 , Kai Cheng 2 , Yongsheng Chen 2 , Zhijie Kong 1 , Jin Luo 1 , Chuan-Jian Zhong 1
1 , State University of New York at Binghamton, BInghamton, New York, United States, 2 Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hongkong, China
Show AbstractAbout 30-40% fuel economy advantage has been demonstrated by diesel-powered vehicles over their gasoline counterparts, which translates to about 20% reduction in greenhouse gas CO2 emission. However, one of the major challenges for diesel-driven vehicles is the emission of significant amounts of particulate matter (PM) and oxides of nitrogen (NOx) in addition to hydrocarbon (HC), and carbon monoxide (CO). There is increasing evidence showing that exposure to NOx poses a number of health concerns and impact the global climate. In this report, we will discuss some of the results in an investigation of the synthesis and processing of Pt (or Pd) based nanoalloys and their use as Diesel Oxidation Catalysts (DOC) and Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) catalysts. The size and composition of the nanoalloy catalysts were controllable. Simulated exhaust gases containing CO, CO2 and H2O were tested to determine the catalytic activities. The results show an enhanced catalytic activity for CO oxidation and NO reduction and stability in comparison with commercial Pt catalysts. In the case of SCR, ammonia was used as reducing agents, showing comparable catalytic activities to the commercial catalysts. These findings have significant implications for the design of advanced catalysts for NOx reduction
8:00 PM - ES10.04.05
Engineered Nanomaterials on Workplace Surfaces—Analysis and Removal
Irene Andreu 1 2 , Viridiana Perez 1 , Tony Ngo 1 , Matthew Bilton 1 , Cameron Hodgins 1 , Kelly Cadieux 1 , Michael Paul 1 , Tania Hidalgo Castillo 1 , Clifton Davies 1 , Stefano Rubino 1 , Byron Gates 1
1 , Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, 2 , BC Cancer Agency, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Show AbstractEngineered nanomaterials are prepared by a diverse range of methods with a large diversity of composition, surface chemistry, size, and shape. An extensive amount of research is on-going to study and develop additional nanomaterials. Many engineered nanomaterials can be found in research laboratories, but also in commercial products. Investigations into the toxicity of nanomaterials and the various routes of exposure have raised the general awareness of the potential risks associated with nanomaterials. The study of potential toxicity of nanomaterials is of interest to the general public due to the increased use of engineered nanomaterials in consumer products, and also for workers involved in the research and production of new engineered nanomaterials. It is, however, a daunting task to investigate the toxicity of each type of engineered nanomaterial due to the vast variety of engineered nanomaterials in use and under study. It is important to improve our understanding of the potential risks of exposure to nanomaterials in the workplace and to establish best practices for limiting this exposure. A major potential of exposure to engineered nanomaterials is the presence of undetected spills of engineered nanomaterial solutions in workplace surfaces, such as countertops, keyboards, or door handles.
In this work, a series of analytical methods were developed for assessing the presence and quantity of engineered nanomaterials on countertops, which are surfaces with a relatively high probability for workers to contact spills of nanomaterials in the workplace. The instrumental techniques evaluated in this study included X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. The established analytical protocols were used to investigate the effectiveness of some current hygiene habits in the workplace. It was found that, even if a visible spill is not present on the countertop, a significant amount of nanomaterials can be present on the countertop, increasing the risk of exposure to the worker. The results of these studies are guiding the development of simple changes to workplace habits to protect all workers from exposure to engineered nanomaterials.
8:00 PM - ES10.04.06
Non-Noble Metal Nanoparticle Catalysts for Dehydrogenation/Hydrogenation Reactions
Michelle Muzzio 1 , Shouheng Sun 1
1 , Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, United States
Show AbstractIn an effort to move toward a CO2-neutral energy cycle, alternate high energy carriers such as hydrogen (H2) have been studied. However, the safe storage and transport of H2, an explosive (in air) and flammable gas, poses challenges. As an alternative, the controlled storage and release of H2 has been widely studied in hydrogen storage materials. Promising examples of these materials are ammonia-borane (AB) and formic acid (FA). Hydrogen storage materials also have the potential to act as a convenient in-situ source of H2 for hydrogenation reactions, that typically require high temperatures and external pressurized hydrogen to occur.
In this work, we synthesized CuNi nanoparticles (NPs) to act as both dehydrogenation catalysts for the methanolysis of AB and subsequent tandem hydrogenation catalysts for nitro/nitrile hydrogenation. With our catalyst, supported on graphene (G), we are able to perform both reactions in one pot at room temperature, without the use of external pressurized hydrogen. AB dehydrogenation activity under these mild conditions reaches a turnover frequency (TOF) of 49.1 / min which rivals, and in many cases outperforms, noble metal catalysts. Subsequent nitro/nitrile hydrogenation in the same pot demonstrates the potential for using a NP catalyst efficienctly for two different reactions, therefore using greener reaction conditions. Our work furthers the understanding of non-noble metal catalysts for the dehydrogenation of hydrogen storage materials, as well as demonstrates the potential of using such a system for other hydrogenation reactions relevant for the synthesis of industrial chemicals and fuels. Recent efforts to develop other non-noble metal catalysts, as well as the potential for magnetically-separable catalysts for tandem hydrogenation/dehydrogenation reactions will also be highlighted.
Symposium Organizers
Martin Green, National Institute of Standards and Technology
Jonathan Cullen, University of Cambridge
William Olson, Seagate Technology
Ashley White, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Symposium Support
National Science Foundation
ES10.05: Materials and Processes to Facilitate Disposal and Reuse of Products at End of Life I
Session Chairs
Tuesday AM, November 28, 2017
Hynes, Level 3, Room 303
8:45 AM - *ES10.05.01
Creating a Circular Economy for Hard Disk Drives—Building and Implementing a Shared Vision
Carol Handwerker 1 , William Olson 2 , Wayne Rifer 3 , Mark Schaffer 4
1 , Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, United States, 2 , Seagate, Chicago, Illinois, United States, 3 , Green Electronics Council, Portland, Oregon, United States, 4 , iNEMI, Austin, Texas, United States
Show AbstractThe iNEMI project on Value Recovery from Used Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) is an industry-academia-government lab-NGO partnership whose vision is increasing value recovery from HDDs throughout their useful lives, with an ultimate goal of creating a global, circular economy for HDDs. Hard disk drives have a special role in electronics: they are ubiquitous, having been designed to be replaceable and interchangeable in products as diverse as computers, servers, and sensor/monitoring equipment. In Phase 1 of the project, an iNEMI multi-stakeholder team developed the groundwork and created momentum for a Phase 2 collaborative project to build an integrated, sustainable, adaptive system for value recovery from end-of-use HDDs. This project has been designed and operated based on extensive research on the most effective methods for sustainable management of common pool resources on which many people rely for their livelihoods. Dr. Elinor Ostrom (2009 Nobel Laureate in Economics) laid out a framework for how people and organizations develop voluntary, community-based solutions involving adaptive, self-governing systems that effectively manage common pool resources without the need for government regulations or privatization. We have applied this framework explicitly to HDDs, as a first demonstration. Phase 1 was built on stakeholders identifying decision pathways for HDD refurbishment, component reuse, and material recovery, incorporating economic and resource recovery analyses, and identifying how and why stakeholders make decisions that limit value recovery. The Phase 1 findings showed the existing barriers to value recovery based on these decisions and established the basis for a more effective, implementable system. The on-going Phase 2 team includes a broad cross-section of electronics stakeholders: HDD designers and manufacturers, different types of users/owners (and discarders) of HDDs, IT asset managers, technology developers, reuse and recycling companies that do both pre-processing and final processing, standards development organizations, and R&D organizations that can fill critical technology and materials gaps to increase value recovery and make the circular economy a reality. The US Department of Energy’s Critical Materials Institute is playing an important role by creating new technologies for rare earth metal resource recovery, as well as by using this analysis to propose specific recommendations to strengthen the US manufacturing base.
9:15 AM - ES10.05.03
Developing a Streamlined, Functionality-Based Screening Tool to Estimate Impacts of Disruptive Technology Trends on Future Commodity Demand
Michele Bustamante 1 , Richard Roth 1 , Randolph Kirchain 1 , Frank Field 1
1 , Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Show AbstractDisruptive technologies, like the internet-of-things, renewable energy technologies, and autonomous electric vehicles, transform more than just the economy, they also transform the material commodities upon which that economy is based. As technology develops more rapidly, the need to evaluate these economically critical materials becomes more urgent to avoid dynamic scarcity-driven restrictions to the technologies’ adoption and potential societal benefits. Criticality assessment frameworks are used to assess vulnerability to supply risk on the basis of demand indicators, but they typically focus on past or current use as snapshots in time. Although more forward-looking, prospective criticality related studies do exist, they often require a great deal of data collection to support complex supply-chain modeling, typically necessitating narrow scopes of commodities or end-use applications. In the tradition of streamlined approaches, like sLCA (streamlined life cycle assessment), a framework was developed to estimate potential future impacts of disruptive technologies using a limited number of key metrics that largely determine demand growth, consider important balancing factors such as substitutability, and can be assessed semi-qualitatively. The approach is strengthened beyond its relative ease of use by its aptitude for accommodating breadth of scope in commodities and technologies. This is made possible by rooting its impact evaluation deeply in understanding of functional linkages between commodity properties and technology needs rather than artificial restriction to a predetermined set of applications. This framework is useful to evaluate the impact of a given technology or set of technologies on multiple commodities relative to one another as well as to identify which disruptive technology may be driving future demand growth most for a given commodity. The latter makes it a valuable tool to make early assessments of which applications may benefit from focused development of material efficiency and circularity strategies if the commodity's supply-chain is less secure. The approach is demonstrated on commonly discussed commodities, such as lithium, tin and cobalt, as well as less commonly discussed commodities, like silver and vanadium.
10:15 AM - *ES10.05.05
Metal Additive Manufacturing and the Circular Economy
Julie Schoenung 1
1 , University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California, United States
Show AbstractAdditive manufacturing (also known as 3D printing) is exploding in interest around the world. Although commonly considered as a way to make unique, custom, near-net-shape polymeric components and objects, this technique can also be applied to metals. Metal additive is far more complex than polymer 3D printing, yet also offers potential performance and part design benefits. From the perspective of the circular economy, metal additive presents the benefits of being able to design parts with less material. Another benefit is the lack of a need (or at least a reduced need) for material removal through machining and other subtractive processes. Additional benefits can include innovative design for functionality such as through the implementation of gradient materials, thus removing the need for materials joining. This technology, however, also generates excessive waste, especially of powder that is not incorporated into the build. Our recent work explores the possibility to close the loop by investigating the feasibility of utilizing the waste powder as an alternative feedstock to the conventional gas atomized powder. Moreover, additional alternative feedstock materials derived from more generic metal waste (e.g., machining chips) are also being explored. In parallel with confirming experimental feasibility, economic and environmental impact considerations are also being assessed.
11:00 AM - ES10.05.07
Low Cost, Self-Cementing Fly Ash Binder with Negative CO2 Footprint
Sung Hoon Hwang 1 , Rouzbeh Shahsavari 2 1
1 Materials Science and NanoEngineering, Rice University, Houston, Texas, United States, 2 Civil and Environmental Engineering, Rice University, Houston, Texas, United States
Show AbstractAs the topmost binder in construction industry, the production of cement induces significant environmental concerns including carbon dioxide footprint and high energy consumption. Consequently, intensive efforts have been directed towards finding an alternative binder, whose production is environmentally benign and less energy intensive. Fly ash, the largely available, major waste product from coal combustion, perfectly fit the criteria as the long-term replacement of cement. Due to its cementitious properties and pozzolanic activity, it is already widely adopted as a supplementary cementitious material (SCM), replacing 20-50% of cement in a concrete design. The main factor which prevents the use of fly ash as the sole source of binder is the high concentration of alkaline sodium-based chemicals required for its activation, which prompt the cost and safety issues. Therefore, finding safer and less expensive route towards fly ash activation is the ultimate challenge for increasing the scope of its applications in construction industry. Herein, we propose for the first time, the cementless, fly-ash-calcium oxide composite (FA-CaO), which accomplishes the notable early-age strength with the significantly reduced quantity of sodium based activators. Via the Taguchi design of experiments, the optimum early-age strength (7-day) of 16.18 MPa, the value comparable to the standard 7-day strength of Portland cement is achieved. The microstructural studies based on XRD, TGA and SEM-EDS demonstrate that the starting Ca/Na molar ratio and the amount of nanosilica play instumental roles in strength development by affecting the formation of key reaction products i.e. calcium silicate hydrate (C-S-H), portlandite and Ca3Al2(OH)12. Nanosilica in the amount of 3-5% serve as the critical strength-enhancing factor, which suppresses the formation of Ca3Al2(OH)12, while it facilitates the formation of C-S-H, which in turn favors the strength development. Overall, the CO2-free binder composition presented in this study will open up the door towards new opportunities in enhancing the recycling rate of the major coal combustion product and simultaneously, reducing the environmental concerns raised by cement manufacturing.
11:15 AM - ES10.05.08
A Water Based Process to Convert Vegetable Biomass into Bioplastic Films
Giovanni Perotto 1 , Luca Ceseracciu 1 , Roberto Simonutti 2 , Uttam Paul 1 , Susana Guzman-Puyol 1 , Thi-Nga Tran 1 , Ilker Bayer 1 , Athanassia Athanassiou 1
1 , Italian Inst of Technology, Genova Italy, 2 , Università di Milano-Bicocca, Milano Italy
Show AbstractThe valorization of vegetable wastes can create opportunities to reduce the environmental concerns associated with disposal of such vegetable waste in the landfills and stimulate economic development. [1] The food industry generates waste in all the steps of the supply chain and the costs associated with disposal and the low revenue obtained by composting, incineration or use as feedstock for animals, make the most simple ways of recycling vegetable waste often not attractive.
In the circular economy framework, vegetable wastes can be seen as an important source of raw materials, which lead to the development of concepts like the biorefinery. [2]
The use of food waste as a source for raw materials for bioplastics is an especially sought result,[3] since it could significantly improve the sustainability of our economy: substitution of plastics produced from non-renewable sources with bioplastics that are derived from renewable sources and that are able to go back to the environment closing the loop in a sustainable way.[4] Examples of conversion of biomass and food waste into modern biodegradable plastics are starch-based plastics, biopolymers like polylactic acid, or materials bio-synthesized from biomass like PHAs. Proteins were also recently proposed as structural and functional biopolymers, leveraging their biocompatibility and the wide variety of fabrication tools.
We will report on our most recent results to develop a one-step process to fully convert a variety of vegetable waste materials into bioplastic films.
The process is carried out in a diluted aqueous solution at room temperature, avoiding the environmental concerns usually associated with the use of organic or dangerous chemicals and making it easily scalable. Freestanding, flexible bioplastic films were obtained from vegetable wastes like carrot, parsley, radicchio and cauliflower. They have similar mechanical properties with bioplastics like thermoplastic starch and are completely biodegradable.
The color and the functional properties of the starting vegetables (i.e. antioxidant capability) are preserved in the bioplastics, thanks to the mild conditions of the fabrication process. The developed conversion process allows the blending of the bioplastics with other natural or synthetic polymers, in order to improve their mechanical and gas barrier properties like the oxygen permeability, thus expanding their field of applications and making the vegetable bioplastics interesting for applications such as packaging.
[1] L. Shen, E. Worrell, M. Patel, Biofuels, Bioproducts and Biorefining 2010, 4, 25.
[2] J. H. Clark, F. E. I. Deswarte, T. J. Farmer, Biofuels, Bioproducts and Biorefining 2009, 3, 72.
[3] H. Feil, Agro-Food-Industry Hi-Tech 1995.
[4] W. E. F. Ellen MacArthur Foundation, McKinsey & Company, 2016.
11:30 AM - ES10.05.09
Efficient Recycling of Polylactic Acid Nanoparticle Templates for the Synthesis of Hollow Silica Spheres
Elia Schneider 1 , Wendelin Stark 1
1 , ETH Zürich, Zurich Switzerland
Show AbstractReusing and recycling materials is a crucial step regarding sustainability and energy and materials efficiency. However, in the field of hollow nanospheres, most synthesis methods rely on sacrificial templates. The synthesis of hollow silica spheres, for example, is usually carried out via surface coating and subsequent calcination of polystyrene spheres.1 Hollow silica particles are of interest in next generation insulation materials and as lightweight fillers in polymers for fuel-efficient mobility.2 Thus, it is expected that in the next years the demand for these kind of fillers will increase substantially, motivating the development of more sustainable and scalable synthesis procedures.3 Therefore, we developed a new process for the synthesis of hollow silica spheres based on the principles of circular materials economy. Hollow silica spheres could be obtained in a recycling process using bio-derived polylactic acid as a template, thus avoiding CO2 emissions compared to standard processes using calcination for template removal.4 The first successful silica coating of polylactic acid nanoparticles, resulting in fully coated polylactic acid-silica core-shell nanoparticles, was carried out using simple synthesis protocols. Subsequent dissolution treatment efficiently dissolved the polylactic acid core template and exclusively yielded hollow silica spheres with a shell thickness of 16 ± 1 nm. The collected polylactic acid (85 %) could then directly be recycled from the template removal solution and re-used to synthesize polylactic acid nanoparticles via nanoprecipitation for a next batch of hollow silica nanospheres. Applying the circular materials economy approach to the synthesis of hollow silica spheres resulted in a substantial decrease of CO2 emissions, a decrease in energy consumption and a decrease in used reactants, since the PLA could be recycled.
[1] L. Ernawati, T. Ogi, R. Balgis, K. Okuyama, M. Stucki, S. C. Hess, W. J. Stark, Langmuir 2016, 32, 338-345.
[2] R. K. Sharma, S. Sharma, S. Dutta, R. Zboril, M. B. Gawande, Green Chem. 2015, 17, 3207-3230.
[3] Y. Yang, T. Coradin, Green Chem. 2008, 10, 183-190.
[4] E. M. Schneider, S. Taniguchi, Y. Kobayashi, S. C. Hess, R. Balgis, T. Ogi, K. Okuyama, W. J. Stark, ACS Sust. Chem. Eng. 2017, 5, 4941-4947.
ES10.06: Materials and Processes to Facilitate Disposal and Reuse of Products at End of Life II
Session Chairs
Gabrielle Gaustad
Carol Handwerker
Tuesday PM, November 28, 2017
Hynes, Level 3, Room 303
1:30 PM - *ES10.06.01
Residue Valorization Strategies for a Circular Materials Processing Industry
Karel Van Acker 1 , Andrea Di Maria 1
1 , KU Leuven, Leuven Belgium
Show AbstractThe circular materials economy can be realized step by step through many different, complementary strategies. One very promising strategy on the short term is to fully and qualitatively valorize industrial residues. Globally, industrial dump sites contain billion tons of slags, dusts, sludges, tailings and other waste which include significant amounts of (critical) metals and of minerals. Vast new waste streams of the materials processing industry are added each year. Valorization of these industrial residues becomes economically viable when different constituting elements, metals and minerals, are recovered at the same time and at the highest quality possible. This becomes reality today, by using a flexible toolbox of already existing and newly developed “metallurgical unit operations”. Environmental impacts of these industrial dumps are mitigated and the need for virgin resources avoided. The mineral fraction can be converted in valuable construction materials, to avoid e.g. ordinary Portland cement, instead of being landfilled or downcycled as base material under roads.
This paper gives an overview of the current status of this “circular processing industries” strategy and frames it in the broader context of circular economy policy. Concrete examples of the valorization of goethite from zinc production, of stainless steel slags and of historical landfills will be presented and its possible contribution in terms of reduced virgin materials need, environmental impact based on life cycle assessment and material flow analysis, and economic feasibility will be discussed.
2:00 PM - ES10.06.02
An Energy Assessment of Chemically Extracting Copper from Steel Scrap
Katrin Daehn 1 , Andre Serrenho 1 , Julian Allwood 1
1 , University of Cambridge, Cambridge United Kingdom
Show AbstractTo cut carbon emissions associated with steel production, the circular economy model has been proposed. However, steel is often recycled to applications of lower quality, largely due to the presence of elements that attach at end-of-life and are not removed from the melt in commercial practice. Copper, originating primarily from wiring and motors in vehicles, appliances and equipment, is most pervasive and causes metallurgical problems, such as surface hot shortness during casting and hot rolling. Most high-value flat products that require excellent surface properties limit the copper concentration to below 0.1 wt%. End-of-life scrap is therefore often used in lower-value applications, such as reinforcing bar and structural sections. A range of interventions can be applied along the supply chain to control contamination, including improved physical shredding and separation. However, a chemical extraction technique could be universally applied to contaminated scrap and would be capable of removing copper already embedded in steel products. An understanding of the possibilities of copper extraction, along with the energy and material requirements of the processes, is necessary. A systematic framework is constructed in which the full range of possible separation routes and operating parameters are defined. Past experimental work is catalogued, and governing thermodynamic and kinetic equations are used to evaluate the feasibility of separation routes and to make statements on the fundamental energy, time and material requirements of the processes to remove copper from the typical contaminated concentration (0.4 wt%) to the concentration allowing for the production of flat products (0.1 wt%). This analysis reveals the space that exists for a commercial process, and sets a framework to think practically about the energy requirements for operating a circular economy and the extent to which it could offset carbon emissions.
2:15 PM - ES10.06.03
Is Availability of Structural Steel for Reuse in the UK a Barrier?
Michal Drewniok 1 , Cyrille Dunant 1 , Jonathan Cullen 1 , Julian Allwood 1
1 Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, Cambridge United Kingdom
Show AbstractApproximately 50% energy and 75% CO2 production savings could be achieved due to steel recycling. However, the strategy which eliminates both is reuse. In regards to steel used in construction, if it is not fatigued or subject of fire, can be successful use after the end-of-life of a building in other structures. Unfortunately, it was reported that only around 7% of heavy structural sections and tubes is reuse. Practical in nature barriers which preventing steel reuse on a large scale are: availability, timing, and testing.
Annually, from all products the UK generates around 9.0 Mt of steel scrap of this around 78% is exported for recycling. The UK consumption of hot rolled, fabricated and hollow sections is 0.867 Mt pa of which 0.730 Mt is used in buildings.
In our work, we extended available consumption data of finished steel products (steel sections, rebars, plates, light sections, sheet, hollow sections) for 1900-1998 in the UK, until 2015. Extension was based on production and trade data. Through a modelling of overall steel consumption in the construction market and calibration from construction industry studies, we determine the inflows to the construction industry in the UK. We choose a dynamic material flow approach to compute the material flows of steel as it moves from imports and semi-finished products, to use, to scrap. For this approach, a transfer function linking the inflows and outflows was calibrated. The features of this transfer function were then interpreted to separate out the contributions of structural steel, which are expected to have longer lifetimes than any other product categories. This indirect approach was used as the data available to perform this calculation is of much higher quality than the data specific to the construction industry.
We concluded that 0.40 Mt of steel sections could have been made available for reuse in 2015. This volume could cover 45-55% of structural steel demand in the UK. Therefore, the availability of reclaimed steel sections in principle, should not be a barrier to more widespread reuse.
This research was founded from Innovate UK founds, project “Supply Chain Integration for structural steel reuse", ref 132106 and EPSRC Material demand reduction, ref. EP/N02351X/1.
2:30 PM - ES10.06.04
A Fine Resolution Assessment of the Potential for Diverting Flat Steel Scrap into Use in Europe
Iain Flint 1 , Julian Allwood 1 , Andre Serrenho 1
1 , University of Cambridge, Cambridge United Kingdom
Show AbstractNearly a third of every coil of flat steel does not end up in a final product. This material is instead scrapped during manufacturing and recycled primarily to make lower value long products such as rebar and structural beams. To avoid the cost and emissions associated with remelting, some of this scrap could instead be diverted for use in other flat applications. However, this depends not just on the mass of the scrapped steel, but also on its material characteristics. To enhance our understanding of the potential for such scrap diversion, we present a material flow analysis of flat steel produced in Europe in 2013 with the flows of steel characterized not only by mass but also by grade, thickness and coating. Using this dataset, we further assess the potential for combining orders from all manufacturing sectors at the blanking stage based on overlap of required material characteristics, allowing for improved nesting of parts and a resulting reduction in scrap. We show that this method of downstream supply chain integration offers not only significant competitive advantages for steelmakers and manufacturers but also substantial CO2 savings across the supply chain as the emissions from melting potentially millions of tonnes of liquid steel can be avoided with no loss of service.
3:15 PM - *ES10.06.05
Key Technical Issues for Li-Ion Battery Recycling
Linda L. Gaines 1 , Jeffrey Spangenberger 1
1 , Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, Illinois, United States
Show AbstractPyrometallurgical recycling of Li-ion batteries recovers valuable transition metals but loses both the Li and the Al to slag. All of the organics and the Al are oxidized to supply process heat and reduce the transition metals. No valuable product can be recovered from lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cathodes. In addition, a large expenditure is necessary for an economical industrial-scale plant. The main advantage of smelting is the ability to handle batteries of mixed cathode compositions, but the elements must eventually be separated out by leaching before reuse. These cathode elements, especially Co and Ni, are the valuable products, and the process is operating commercially.
Hydrometallurgical processing and direct recovery are both potentially economic on a smaller scale at lower temperature, and therefore would not require as large an investment. The Cu and Al foils are easily recoverable as pure metals, although they must be separated from each other. The main interest for hydrometallurgy is in recovery of the transition metals and Li from the cathode; direct recycling goes one step farther and seeks to recover cathode materials with still-useful morphology. This is especially attractive for LFP cathodes, being the only method so far devised to recover any value from them. Electrolyte and anode materials could also be recovered.
Detailed process analysis reveals that hydrometallurgy and direct recycling are similar processes, with the key difference being the presence or absence of acid (or base) in the material processing stream. Acid separates the cathode components, with lower pH expected to enable more separation. Thus, the Li can be separated from the metal oxides, which can in turn be separated by solvent extraction, or reused to make new cathodes. If cathode production is difficult, energy-intensive, or expensive, it would be desirable to recover usable cathode material. If no acid is present, the cathode structure may be maintained and potentially reused in new cells. Thus, we suggest a continuum of processes from hydrometallurgy with strong acid to direct recycling with none.
One key technical issue is that this continuum has not been characterized. Experiments to map material structure and composition as a function of pH and temperature are planned. The cathode material must be consistently free from Al and retain its design morphology. Crystal structure, layering, and engineered material gradients must be retained. Separation technology is required because mixtures of materials are generally inferior to their components, or some way of treating mixed cathodes is needed. In the absence of standardized materials or cell geometry, planning for effective recycling is difficult, but design-for-recycling has taken second place to initial performance goals. Additional issues include how to ensure collection of batteries and safe transport to reputable recycling facilities. This presentation will survey progress to address these issues.
3:45 PM - ES10.06.06
Energy Efficient Recovery of Lead from Spent Lead Acid Batteries Using Deep Eutectic Solvents
Andrew Ballantyne 1 , Geoff H. Kelsall 2 , Jason Hallett 2 , D. Jason Riley 1 , Nilay Shah 2 , David Payne 1
1 Department of Materials, Imperial College London, London United Kingdom, 2 Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London, London United Kingdom
Show AbstractWe shall describe a novel dissolution-electrodeposition process for the recovery of lead from lead acid batteries (LABs) utilising deep eutectic solvents (DESs), promising new solvents for electrolytic processes due to their unique solvation behaviour. Such a process could replace the smelting operation used presently in LAB recycling, an energetically intensive and environmentally hazardous process.
Despite the increasing popularity of lithium ion batteries, LABs still account for ca. 50% by value of all batteries produced worldwide. The finite supply and high toxicity of Pb means that efficient recycling is essential for sustainable manufacturing. LAB recycling is a success story with up to 98% of the battery able to be recycled for further uses. Ca. 95% of waste LABs in the EU are recycled and > 50% of the lead used in LAB manufacture comes from secondary sources.[1]
The active energy storage material in LABs, a mixture of Pb, PbO, PbSO4 and PbO2, is separated from the battery grids, casings and electrode separators and smelted with coal / coke and natural gas at > 1000 °C, requiring 5 – 10 MJ (kg Pb)-1. The generated Pb may then be refined to separate their minor components.[2]
Hydrometallurgical processes with decreased specific energy consumption have been developed and some deployed, whereby lead compounds are dissolved in liquid media followed by cathodic electrodeposition of elemental lead, with the option of anodic electrodeposition of PbO2. However, their energy efficiency, cost and durability limitations provide opportunities for novel processes.[3,4]
We shall outline the use of DESs in the development of an ionometallurgical process for the recovery of lead from end-of-life LABS. DESs are liquids formed from two components that combine through hydrogen bonding to form mixtures that melt at low temperatures. Type 3 DESs are the most common, formed from organic halide salts and small, polar organic compounds. Typically, DESs are composed of environmentally benign chemicals, e.g. 4.6 M Cl-, providing the basis of a range of electrolytic metal processes.[5] We shall detail the solubility of Pb salts in DESs determined by ICP-OES measurements, the electrochemical behaviour of such solutions and the properties of the resulting electrodeposits.
1 Davidson A. J., Binks S. P., Gediga J, Int J. Life Cycle Assess., 2016, 21, 1624
2 Iain Thornton, Radu Rautiu, Susan Brush, 2001, Lead: the facts, Surrey, Ian Allan Printing Ltd.
3 Gernon M. D., Wu M., Buszta T., Janney P., Green Chem, 1999, 1, 127
4 Diaz G., Andrews D, JOM, 1996, 48, 1, 29
5 Smith E. L., Abbott A. P., Ryder K. S., Chem Rev, 2014, 114, 21, 11060
4:00 PM - ES10.06.07
Materials Efficiency in the Sustainable Energy Transition—The Case of Flow Battery Energy Storage
Brian Tarroja 1 , Haoyang He 1 , Oladele Ogunseitan 1 , Scott Samuelsen 1 , Julie Schoenung 1
1 , University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California, United States
Show AbstractThe energy system is currently undergoing a significant transformation in response to concerns regarding the environmental, energy security, and resilience of fossil-fuel based energy resources. Ongoing trends include the increased usage of variable wind and solar generation, increased electrification of energy end uses, and increased operational flexibility. Among the wide range of new technologies being deployed, large-scale deployment of electric energy storage is shaping up to fulfill a key role in facilitating these transitions. These systems, however, are diverse in terms of not only their use-phase energy performance, but also the types and amounts of materials that are used and emitted throughout their life cycle from materials extraction, manufacturing, use, and disposal or recycling. Before these systems are deployed to a large scale, it is important to have a strategy for ensuring that their deployment minimizes their net materials footprint and associated environmental impacts. In this context, this project is focused on assessing and improving the life cycle materials footprint and associated environmental impacts of flow battery energy storage systems, which are promising candidates for large scale electric energy storage. First, to determine the energy use, materials use, waste emissions, and applicable process costs of materials mining, production, use, and disposal or recycling (where applicable) processes used to deploy flow battery systems by working with the flow battery manufacturers of three different chemistries: Vanadium Redox (V2O5), Zinc-Bromide (ZnBr), and Iron-Sodium (FeNa). Second, to determine the environmental impacts associated with the determined energy/materials use and waste emissions, including but not limited to greenhouse gas emissions, air quality effects, human and ecological toxicity. Third, to translate the relevant environmental impacts to impacts on human health of affected populations. Finally, the technical results will be combined with knowledge of material prices and environmental costs to develop business cases for incentivizing environmentally benign or beneficial life cycle supply chain configurations. Overall, this project aims to provide insight into developing a strategy to avoid potentially unintended materials footprint consequences associated with energy storage deployment before these systems are deployed to a large scale.
4:15 PM - ES10.06.08
Designing Nano-Enabled Biosensors for Reuse—A CNT-Enabled Biomarker Sensor Case Study
Salman Abbasi 1 , Hobin Jeong 1 , Ahmed Busnaina 1 , Jacqueline Isaacs 1
1 , Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Show AbstractThrough utilization of exceptional sensing properties, functionalized nanomaterials can lead to reliable, cost-effective devices, capable of substantial benefits to society. Widespread implementation for applications with CNTs, however, has two major concerns: 1) potential toxicity issues if releases or exposures occur, and 2) high embodied energy. Until the uncertainty regarding toxicity diminishes and fabrication processes become more efficient, strategies must be developed to avoid unintended consequences from commercialization.
Product stewardship strategies could contribute in this regard, where reusability and recyclability of these nano-enabled devices would limit widespread CNT dispersion and facilitate their reuse. To demonstrate this concept, a tattoo-based CNT-enabled enzymatic biomarker sensor was redesigned to avoid the potential effects of its end-of-life disposal, and to lower the resource consumption for its manufacture. CNTs were transfer printed onto a flexible substrate followed by electrochemical deposition of a pyrrole based polymer film aimed to protect the nanotubes from unwanted functionalization\contamination. The polypyrrole coated nanotube channel was then functionalized with a suitable enzyme. It is intended that manufacturers would receive used sensors from consumers, which would then be sterilized and de-functionalized through removal of the polypyrrole layer and annealing, after which, sensors would be re-functionalized and repackaged. Associated with this reuse strategy could be a decrease in the sensor’s performance that needs to be quantified. This study aims to relate the decrease in the sensor’s performance with the achieved reduction in the environmental impact to highlight the tradeoffs of employing this reuse strategy. The challenges faced to reusing\recycling nano-enabled devices and printed electronics are also investigated, and will be presented.
Symposium Organizers
Martin Green, National Institute of Standards and Technology
Jonathan Cullen, University of Cambridge
William Olson, Seagate Technology
Ashley White, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Symposium Support
National Science Foundation
ES10.07: Improved Materials Performance
Session Chairs
Wednesday AM, November 29, 2017
Hynes, Level 3, Room 303
8:45 AM - ES10.07.01
Flexible Piezoelectric Generators for Energy Conversion and Self-Powered Applications
Junwen Zhong 1
1 , University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California, United States
Show AbstractWith the rise of intelligent wearable electronics, energy harvesters converting rich but irregular mechanical energy into electricity have attracted much attention, as this method can reduce the dependence on batteries. Herein, various flexible generators based piezoelectret are successfully fabricated, with the fundamental working mechanism of electrostatic induction caused by the surplus charges. Specifically, the charges capturing ability of the piezoelectret materials and the structure of the generators are optimized, in order to improve the output power and stability. These generators have been demonstrated the self-powered applications in mobile health care, human interaction and wireless communication, etc. These works not only offer new valuable insights, but will open up new perspectives to develop self-powered wearable devices with high properties.
9:00 AM - ES10.07.02
Potential Role of Motion for Enhancing Maximum Output Energy of Triboelectric Nanogenerator
Kyun-Eun Byun 1 , Min-Hyun Lee 1 , Yeonchoo Cho 1 , Seung-Geol Nam 1 , Hyeon-Jin Shin 1 , Seongjun Park 1
1 , SAIT, Suwon Korea (the Republic of)
Show AbstractAlthough triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) have been explored as one of the possible candidates for the auxiliary power source of portable and wearable devices, the output energy of a TENG is still insufficient to charge the devices with daily motion. Moreover, the fundamental aspects of the maximum possible energy of a TENG related with human motion are not understood systematically. Here, we confirmed the possibility of charging commercialized portable and wearable devices such as smart phones and smart watches by utilizing the mechanical energy generated by human motion. The mechanical energy from human motion for 1 min was found to range from 60 mJ to 510 J, depending on the moving part of the body and velocity. We confirmed by theoretical extraction that the maximum possible energy is related with specific form factors of a TENG. Further, we experimentally demonstrated the effect of human motion in an aspect of kinetic energy and impulse using varying velocity and elasticity, and clarified how to improve the maximum possible energy of a TENG. The velocity did not significantly change EMP, but the elasticity increased EMP by increasing Qsc, max, Voc, max, and V’max. The optimization of output energy of a TENG in actual use remains a task for future work because a real system has many limitations such as impedance matching, frequency control, and the stability of the structure. Nevertheless, the results of this study give insight into the design of a TENG to obtain a large amount of energy in a limited space.
9:15 AM - ES10.07.03
High-Temperature Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) Devices Using Tungsten Interdigital Transducers on CTGS Single Crystal Substrate
Andreas Winkler 1 , Gayatri Rane 1 , Erik Brachmann 1 , Marietta Seifert 1 , Thomas Gemming 1 , Hagen Schmidt 1 , Siegfried Menzel 1
1 , Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Material Research (IFW), Dresden Germany
Show AbstractMonitoring and control of environment conditions in chemical or physical processes is of huge importance in smart city systems or automated industry setups. Unfortunately, some of these processes are carried out at high temperature (HT), under corrosive atmosphere or at locations difficult to access, so that monitoring tasks can be hardly achieved with conventional sensors.
Small, passive surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices can be wirelessly operated and even mounted on moving or rotating objects [1]. Currently, SAW sensors are commercially available for a temperature range of -150 °C to 350 °C [2, 3], but various applications demand much temperatures of operation of up to 1000 °C. Realization of such devices requires an improvement of both, the piezoelectric substrate and the interdigital transducer (IDT) electrode material system, wherein the latter is currently limiting the sensor development. Pt- and Pd-based material systems are suitable for IDT architectures at HT. However, an operation above approx. 0.4 of the melting temperature Tm, e.g. above 700°C, leads to major degradation mechanisms including agglomeration by volume/surface diffusion, cracking, delamination along with stress-driven mechanisms like HT creep.
Based on our previous work [4-6], we present the first HT-suitable SAW devices with tungsten IDTs realized via magnetron sputtering and subsequent reactive ion etching on piezoelectric CTGS (Ca3TaGa3Si2O14) substrate as an alternative to noble metal systems. The microstructural characterization of extended W films has been carried out using X-ray diffraction, X-ray reflectivity, texture measurements, scanning and transmission electron microscopy and stress measurements. SAW devices were investigated by electrical network analysis and scanning electron microscopy before and after heat treatment at 600 °C and above for up to 24 h. Wireless interrogation with the devices positioned in a HT oven was successfully realized via customized antennas, based on screen-printed Pt-electrodes on Al2O3 substrate or a Pt-wire dipole setup. We found that extended films are stable upon annealing to 800 °C for 12 h in vacuum with no degradation in the surface quality, no intermixing of the W-Mo layers and an almost 10 % reduction of electrical resistivity. Fabricated SAW devices show only minimal shift in their driving frequency due to limited crystal growth at the electrode edges during heat treatment at 600 °C for 24 h, explainable via material diffusion due to stress relaxation effects.
1 Elmazria, O. and T. Aubert, in SPIE 8066 - Smart Sens. Act. MEMS V, Prague / Czech Rep., 806602 (2011).
2 Vellekoop, M.J., Ultrasonics 36, 1, 7-14 (1998).
3 Greve, D.W., C. T-L. et al., Sensors 13, 6, 6910-6935 (2013).
4 Rane, G.K., S. Menzel et al., Thin Solid Films 571, 1-8 (2014).
5 Rane, G.K., S. Menzel et al., Mat. Sci. Eng. B-Adv. Funct. Sol.State Mat. 202, 31-38 (2015).
6 Rane, G.K., M. Seifert et al., Materials 9, 2, 101-110 (2016).
9:30 AM - ES10.07.05
Extending Operational Conditions of Functional Thin Films and Associated SAW Microsensors for Real-Time Harsh-Environment Monitoring
Robert Fryer 1 , Paul Ohodnicki 2
1 , National Energy Technology Laboratory, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, 2 , National Energy Technology Laboratory, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
Show Abstract
Significant benefits can be achieved by installing miniature sensors and actuators onto costly, complex machinery used in high-temperature industrial, energy, and aerospace environments to yield diagnostic and prognostic data, which would enable maintenance cost reductions and improve efficiencies and materials lifetimes. Unfortunately, modern thin film materials rapidly degrade in the high-temperature, harsh conditions of interest to these sectors, with operational temperatures nearing 1000 °C or greater and often within chemically aggressive atmospheres, making sensors and other monitoring devices unstable and short-lived. Surface acoustic wave (SAW) sensors are an attractive platform for such applications given their compact size, simplistic design, and ability to operate both wirelessly and passively with multi-sensor interrogation from a single antenna. They have been mainly developed for temperature and strain sensing, but challenges remain with thermodynamic instabilities of the thin film electrode components, which leads to rapid device failure around 1000 °C. SAW devices can also be configured for detection of gas species and partial pressures by depositing onto the substrate surface a resistive oxide thin film that exhibits film resistance responses upon film-atmosphere exposure via oxygen vacancy interactions. However, unique materials challenges are associated with device operation in chemically aggressive atmospheres, such as instability of the gas sensing layer (e.g., structurally, chemically, electrically) and accelerated degradation of electrode thin films in highly oxidizing or reducing gases. Accordingly, sensor operation is relegated to lower temperatures (500–800 °C) when within these types of gas environments. In this work, metal oxide thin films, including CeO2 and Zr-doped CeO2 formed via sputtering and sol-gel fabrication methods, are developed and tested against various high-temperature treatments in a range of gas atmospheres. Detailed film synthesis and characterization results are presented along with in-situ high-temperature electrical measurements performed during flowing-gas exposures within a tube furnace. A diverse sample set was developed by control of synthesis parameters and relationships between film properties (thickness, morphology, composition) and resistivity responses to gas exposure will be characterized. The mechanism, effectiveness (i.e., sensitivity and selectivity), and stability of the various sensor responses will also be discussed.
ES10.08: Materials Flow Analysis—Supply Chain Efficiency and Risk, Materials Criticality
Session Chairs
Wednesday PM, November 29, 2017
Hynes, Level 3, Room 303
10:15 AM - *ES10.08.01
Technological Aspects of a Circular Materials Economy
Thomas Graedel 1
1 , Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, United States
Show AbstractA circular material economy is one in which materials are reused again and again rather than being used once or twice and then discarded, which is now often the case. A circular economy is an attractive concept, but to what extent can it be realized? This talk will present several issues that will need to be recognized in moving toward a more circular materials economy: (1) Many metals are available only as byproducts of host metals such as copper or zinc – does this impede circularity? (2) As materials scientists have increasingly chosen specific materials to achieve superior product performance, is the concept of substitution for scarce materials less realizable than it once was? (3) Do factors such as national politics, environmental legislation, and geographical limitation render supplies of certain materials uncertain and thus encourage circularity? (4) Will material supply and demand changes over time challenge the potential for a circular materials economy? These issues raise a challenge to the materials science community to consider how its materials choices relate to the use, reuse, and long-term sustainability of resources.
10:45 AM - ES10.08.02
Criticality Mitigation Strategy Effectiveness Metrics: Comparison of Material Efficiency and Circular Economy Approaches for Tellurium
Michele Bustamante 1 , Gabrielle Gaustad 2 , Elisa Alonso 3
1 Materials Systems Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, 2 Golisano Institute for Sustainability, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York, United States, 3 , Elisa Alonso LLC, Towson, Maryland, United States
Show AbstractCriticality assessment is increasingly used as a tool to identify materials of importance facing scarcity risks. Although these studies highlight materials for the implicit purpose of informing future action to reduce this risk, the aggregated nature of the studies’ results make them poorly suited for guiding strategic response. To address this challenge, a complementary metric-based framework has been developed to enable direct comparison of potential mitigation strategies for critical materials. The framework utilizes scenario analysis and features of projected supply and demand balance over time to communicate effectiveness of implementing different strategies at various levels according to their ability to reduce risk in terms of potential gap size and among other features. This talk will focus on findings related to key material efficiency and circularity inspired strategies - dematerialization, yield improvement, and recycling - for a case study critical material, tellurium, used in solar photovoltaics. Evaluation using this framework suggests that, although a crucial part of long-term sustainability, recycling is likely to be least effective for reducing criticality risk for tellurium due to long product lifetimes relative to gap condition emergence, whereas dematerialization and yield can both be effective to the point of preventing supply gap condition onset if pursued in the very near term.
11:00 AM - *ES10.08.03
Secondary and Byproduct Sources of Rare Earth Metals
Gabrielle Gaustad 1 , Alexandra Leader 1 , Eric Williams 1
1 , Rochester Inst of Technology, Rochester, New York, United States
Show AbstractCurrent concerns about lack of diversity in supply of critical materials have spurred research into utilizing domestic sources, particularly from waste streams. This work combines material flow analysis and techno-economic modelling to explore the resource and economic potential for byproducts (coal combustion products, red mud, etc.) and secondary sources (waste electronics, lighting, etc.) to become a valuable source of rare earth elements (REE). Results show that while REE concentrations in coal ash are significantly lower than currently economically extractable ores in most mines, the magnitude of materials available could meet current REE demand even at fairly low extraction yield rates. For many electronic waste products, the concentration is much higher than economically extractable ores but volumes may not meet demand depending on geographic location. In addition, infrastructure for collection and processing may not be in place. A combination of higher REE commodity prices which seems likely, improved yields, and enhanced infrastructure would be required for economic profitability.
11:30 AM - *ES10.08.04
Essential and Critical Element Recycling in America—An Overview
Eric Peterson 1
1 Critical Materials Institute, Idaho National Laboratory, Idaho Falls, Idaho, United States
Show AbstractMetals are infinitely recyclable in principle, but in practice, recycling is often inefficient or nearly nonexistent due to limits imposed by human behavior, product design, recycling technologies, and the thermodynamics of separation. Research into improving reuse and recycling in the United States seeks to enhance efficient reuse and recycling of a highly diverse set of materials that will further diversify the global supply chain of essential materials by enhancing recycling technologies, improving product design, understanding recycling techno-economics and using the thermodynamics of separations. Specifically, for rare earth elements, up to 30% of the supply stream can be lost in manufacturing waste and over 60% of the consumer product reservoir ends up in landfill or construction aggregate. The lack of reuse and recycling is due primarily to the lack of methods that have high enough yield or low enough cost. The sources of recyclable materials are highly diverse and the matrices in which they are found are equally diverse. This diversity is one of the major challenges the Focus Area faces and such diversity drives the ultimate determiner of technology adoption – process economics. We are developing coupled economically viable and environmentally acceptable processing methods that apply to more than one material stream (and potentially to future critical materials) thus reducing the challenge of processing diverse source materials to manufactured products. The challenge is to “re-mine” and make available for utilization this secondary supply in economically feasible ways such that the supply is useful to the world. In addition to the critical materials there is, in some cases, an opportunity to simultaneously recover additional high value materials (such as precious metals) that provides opportunities for improved processing economics and adoption/utilization. This talk will focus on several of our projects that are successfully leading to a recycling ecosystem for essential and critical elements in the United States.
ES10.09: Life Cycle Assessment of Materials, Products and Processes
Session Chairs
Wednesday PM, November 29, 2017
Hynes, Level 3, Room 303
1:30 PM - ES10.09.01
Life Cycle Analysis of Rare Earth Metals Production via Electro-Refining and Manufacturing of Rare Earth Magnets
Ehsan Vahidi 1 , Fu Zhao 1
1 , Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, United States
Show AbstractDue to the importance of Rare Earth Elements (REEs) in many high-tech and clean energy applications, they have received increased attention in recent years. Although production pathway of REEs is known to be environmentally destructive, very limited Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) investigations have yet been conducted. This is particularly true for the electrolysis of the RE oxides in a medium comprising lithium fluoride and RE fluorides, a key step in the high-purity RE metals production pathway as well as manufacturing of NdFeB permanent magnets.
In this study, a comparative LCA was carried out on different electro-refining facilities in China using graphite and tungsten as anode and cathode, respectively. Furthermore, cradle to gate LCA models of RE containing magnets using REEs from monazite/bastnasite deposits in Bayan Obo, as well as ion adsorption clay in China's southern provinces, were developed.
In combination with mass/energy balance and stoichiometry, the life cycle inventories were developed using SimaPro 8 software and Ecoinvent 3 database and the life cycle impact was evaluated by TRACI. LCA results were utilized to determine and quantify environmental hotspots of the electro-refining process and manufacturing of RE magnet. Finally, challenges and opportunities for improved environmental performance of the RE elements production and magnet and phosphor manufacturing processes were discussed.
1:45 PM - ES10.09.02
Life Cycle and Techno-Economic Analysis of III-V Precursors for Photovoltaic and Semiconductor Applications
Brittany Smith 1 , Callie Babbitt 1 , Kelsey Horowitz 2 , Gabrielle Gaustad 1 , Seth Hubbard 1
1 , Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York, United States, 2 , National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, Colorado, United States
Show AbstractIII-V semiconductors have myriad applications, including transistors, LEDs, and high efficiency photovoltaics (PV). The highest throughput commercial manufacturing technique for III-V semiconductors is metal organic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE), which uses precursors of III-V elements with organic ligands. Multiple studies have reported that these precursors are one of the primary drivers of total device costs in several end applications. While this has spurred a significant amount of research on the use of alternative device growth techniques, few studies have explored the cost structure of the current materials or the potential for reducing their cost. Additionally, there is a limited understanding of the environmental impacts of MOVPE precursors. Since the manufacture of the precursors is proprietary, previous life cycle assessments (LCAs) of III-V photovoltaics have relied on approximations from alternate chemicals or discussion with manufacturers, and no LCAs of other III-V products exist to date.
In this study, we provide more precise data on the manufacture of MOVPE precursors through extensive literature and patent research. This data is then used to conduct both techno-economic and life cycle analysis of these key materials and subsequently illustrate potential pathways to reduce manufacturing cost and environmental impact. Techno-economic analysis evaluates the cost structure of the product, and may iteratively analyze techniques to reduce cost. Life-cycle analysis evaluates the environmental impact of producing and using these products, in this case specifically quantifying the total energy used and greenhouse gas emissions.
The precursors most commonly used within industry are arsine, phosphine, trimethylindium, trimethylaluminum, and trimethylgallium. Life cycle data for arsine and phosphine is available in the ecoinvent database, the LCA database used for this study, and will be used as the basis for a cost model. Information from both patents and historic journal articles significantly contributed to the final model of trimethyl-precursor synthesis, which was constructed almost exclusively from existing chemicals in the ecoinvent database. Preliminary life cycle results indicate a significant dependence on the purity level of the metal used in the manufacturing process of the precursors. Achieving a level of purity for semiconductor-grade materials that is at least 99.999% (or 5N) requires multiple washing and refining steps. Cumulative energy demand and cost data will be modeled for the trimethyl-precursors in the final conference paper. These results are anticipated to inform further research and development of these precursors that would result in greater material efficiency and well as reduced costs and energy usage.
2:00 PM - ES10.09.03
Life Cycle Assessment of Phillips 66 Organic Photovoltaics
Brian Worfolk 1 , Amit Kapur 1
1 , Phillips 66, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, United States
Show AbstractOrganic photovoltaics offer a differentiated value proposition compared to other photovoltaic technologies. They combine the potential for highly scalable solution printing on a roll-to-roll basis with superior low-light performance, mechanical flexibility and color tunability.
A life cycle assessment of organic photovoltaic (OPV) modules is performed on conventional materials and those developed by Phillips 66. The cradle-to-grave analysis measures the impacts of polymer synthesis, device fabrication and end-of-life on the primary energy demand and global warming potential. These metrics and the energy payback time are benchmarked against other photovoltaic technologies. Results show that electricity generation with OPVs has the potential to have low greenhouse gas emissions and energy payback time, potential differentiators compared to traditional electricity generation technologies.
2:15 PM - ES10.09.04
Design Rules of a Silicon-Based Photovoltaic Device for Oxidation of Organic Pollutants
Paula Perez Rodriguez 1 , Carlos Maqueira Gonzalez 1 , Luuk Rietveld 1 , Miroslav Zeman 1 , Arno Smets 1
1 , Delft University of Technology, Delft Netherlands
Show AbstractTwo of the main problems of society are the access to clean water and energy. In particular, organic pollutants can be a major health threat. Within available methods, a trade-off can be established between the pollutant treatment price and the final pollutant concentration that can be achieved, with more advanced methods becoming more costly due to high chemical or energy use. In this work, these two variables are decoupled by combining a graphite/graphite electrochemical system with a silicon solar cell that provides the necessary electrical power for pollutant degradation to occur. The graphite electrodes are immersed in the solution to be cleaned, and when an electric current is applied by the solar cell, the electrons form OH radicals on the surface of the graphite anode, which are able to reduce the organic contaminants.
In this work, we establish the design rules of a device that combines both cost-effectiveness and low pollutant concentrations. The two elements forming this system have been separately optimized, to be further combined in one effective device. First, the optimum operational voltage for the graphite electrochemical system was found to be 1.6 V, with only 20 % of the phenol remaining after 4 h of illumination. Then, a variety of solar cell configurations based on different thin film silicon materials were tested to achieve the closest voltage possible while still providing a high current at operating conditions. The closest output voltage that could be provided was by a 1 cm2 a-Si:H/a-Si:H tandem solar cell, with an open-circuit voltage of 1.67 V and short circuit current of 8.88 mA/cm2. This cell produced the best phenol degradation, removing 70% of the initial phenol concentration. In addition, the carbon oxygen demand (COD) was also measured after 4 h, as an indication of the amount of pollutant that has been completely converted into CO2 and H2O, as opposed to forming other organic pollutants. In this case, the a-Si:H/a-Si:H tandem solar cell showed similar phenol concentration and COD levels, indicating that not only is the phenol reacting, but it is also being completely degraded.
Thus, these experiments show that by decoupling the electrochemical and power generation steps in an advanced oxidation device, high rates of organic pollutant degradation can be achieved. Moreover, by proposing the use of readily available materials such as graphite and silicon, the proposed process becomes sustainable and cost-efficient. Finally, it is also important to note that the inclusion of a solar cell as power source makes this device autonomous, and thus can be also used at remote locations.