UNB research could revolutionize aluminum industry

From the Springboard Content Lab and UNB News (Jeremy Elder-Jubelin)

Research at Springboard member University of New Brunswick could revolutionize how we deal with waste from aluminum refining and reduce waste going to landfills. It could also solve real-world problems for industry.

The research, led by chemistry professor Dr. Barry Blight, is could also create a source of green, zero-carbon fuel (hydrogen) which has the potential to decarbonize the aluminum industry.

Dr. Blight and researchers Dr. Mason Lawrence, NSERC postdoctoral fellow and graduate student Robbie Horne, are tackling the challenge of waste material called “dross” which is left after smelting aluminum.

Research shows dross could be used to create hydrogen gas

Dross contains significant amounts of aluminum that isn’t captured by the smelting process, along with other materials including silicates and metals like iron, magnesium and manganese.

In Canada alone, the industry generates an estimated quarter million tonnes of dross per year; globally, that number is estimated to be closer to 5.3 million tonnes per year.

Current methods for extracting more aluminum and other materials from dross are costly, requiring expensive equipment and a significant amount of energy. Because of this, much of this potentially valuable material is simply discarded, ending up in landfills.

The UNB research suggests that dross could be used to cleanly produce hydrogen gas, as well as commercially valuable compounds like high-purity aluminum oxide, which is also used in aluminum smelting. This could be used by industries such as pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, fire retardants and chemical production.

The findings were published in August in the journal RSC Sustainability. It was authored by Dr. Blight.

Making a sustainable future and solving industry challenges

This research shows that aluminum smelting could be more efficient and sustainable by creating a closed-loop, low-energy aluminum digestion process. This is a promising step in decarbonizing for aluminum industry and towards developing an environmentally sustainable future.

The process has also been modified to yield a special, porous type of material called “metal organic frameworks” or MOFs. These MOFs have been a major research focus for Blight’s team, and can be used to store hydrogen, capture carbon, harvest water, or in some cases even to help neutralize chemical weapons.

Because of the way the process works, it forms a closed-loop catalytic system, where the valuable materials are generated without breaking down the catalyst—the elements used to trigger the reaction. The process sustainably generates hydrogen gas and several aluminum materials at a much lower energy cost than currently used methods.

As is often the case, this research breakthrough didn’t happen spontaneously and independently.

Blight’s team had been working on new applications for some of his past research to the production hydrogen gas from water through photocatalysis, a process that uses light energy to make a chemical reaction occur where it otherwise would not.

Enter UNB Office of Research with chemical digestion process

In UNB’s Office of Research Services, the research and innovations partnerships team had become aware of a chemical digestion-based aluminum refining technique, which they brought to Blight as a potential interest.

Chemical digestion takes matter and breaks it down into component molecules through exposure to particular substances, like how the human body breaks down food. This aluminum technique had existed for some time, but had not been commercially viable, nor was it fully developed.

And, just like a successful chemistry experiment, bringing these two ideas together ended up creating just the reaction they were hoping for.

By integrating this prior research and development into his ongoing work, Blight’s team was able to improve on the digestion process. This improvement makes it more efficient and complete, while generating clean hydrogen. They also expanded the process to purify aluminum oxide and to create metal-organic framework material.

The project, supported by Research NB, has continued to pick up speed since, successfully receiving funding for a postdoctoral fellowship and additional research, identifying novel, potentially valuable intellectual property and partnering with industry towards commercialization and other sector needs.

University of New Brunswick is a member of the Springboard Network of 19 post-secondary institutions in Atlantic Canada. Our mission is to grow the regional economy through the commercialization of research and industry engagement.