Strategic metals axis

Excerpt

The general objectives of the Cyclamet project are to:

• Provide a framework for the socio-economic and environmental assessment of strategic metals recycling, including the development of environmental impact indicators to assess the sustainability of their management.
• Develop unit operations to optimize the recovery and valorization of metals contained in end-of-life objects, and to produce salts or marketable metals (purified, in alloy form),
• Provide tools and methods to feed other targeted projects,
• Provide other targeted projects with data on material composition and interconnections between phases (metallic, mineral, organic), reflecting the complexity of the matrices studied.

Keywords: Recycling, strategic metals, hydrometallurgy, automation, processes, sorting

Tasks

Our researches

Socio-economic and environmental assessment of strategic metals recycling

• Systemic approach to material and energy flows under stress for the recycling of strategic metals
• The recycling industry in Europe: Scandinavian countries at the forefront
• Implications of recycling strategies for the defense industry
• Development of environmental impact indicators for strategic metals management

Optimize automation and measurement time, with the aim of setting up on-line analysis systems for sorting adapted to recycling channels

• Target use cases to adapt the method (signal/noise, measurement time, shaping of the incident spectrum…)
• Spectrum processing for fast, accurate quantification of elements of interest
• Automation of the measurement process, with the aim of setting up a sizing support system (identification of atomic elements of interest to guide sorting / instrumentation / measurement optimization).

Develop soft chemical alternatives to existing complex and polluting hydrometallurgical processes for the recovery of strategic metals

• Evaluate the potential of industrial-scale preparative chromatography for metal extraction.
• Use ionic solvents and couple electrolysis and electrodeposition (EE) in a single cell as an alternative to conventional hydrometallurgical processes.
• Develop efficient and economically viable processes, aiming for lower effluent and waste production, energy savings and operator safety.

Develop innovative numerical tools to support the design and scale-up of hydrometallurgical processes for metal recycling, from leaching to separation and purification stages

• Develop a numerical tool to describe the various phenomena influencing the process and their coupling (case study: printed circuit board (PCB) waste).
• Predict the geometric properties of emulsions (interfacial area, breakage/coalescence sites) to enhance the reliability of predictions of M/S operation.

Tools for process optimization

• Development of microfluidic equipment for on-line measurement of parameters such as dissolved O2 and CO2, metal ion concentrations…
• Can Quorum Sensing be “gamed” to improve metal recovery from e-waste?