Area of Interest
Mitigating climate change and resource scarcity are both grand challenges of the 21st century. To tackle the challenges, both CCUS and resource recovery are critical technologies to enable negative carbon emissions and a circular economy. We aim to advance CCUS and resource recovery through multiscale and cross-disciplinary innovations including: (1) developing low carbon separation processes, (2) designing selective materials, and (3) collaborating with practitioners to diffuse novel technologies into impactful solutions.
CCUS
We have demonstrated proof-of-concept for CO2 utilization in water treatment and wastewater reclamation using selective ion exchange processes. We aim to expand our research from CO2 utilization to CO2 capture and sequestration with selective separation innovations. Our goal is to design novel and practical CCUS technologies to facilitate carbon neutrality by the middle of this century. Due to the demand for both carbon neutrality and circular economy for sustainable development, we are especially interested in coupling CCUS with resource recovery technologies to enable CO2-driven resource recovery from waste and CCUS achieved with recovered waste resources.
Resource recovery
Resource recovery boosts a circular economy that addresses resource scarcity and mitigates carbon emissions in conventional resource management. We aim to develop low carbon selective separation processes to recover resources from different wastes. Our interests include but are not limited to recovering (1) water and nutrients from municipal wastewater, (2) metals from industrial wastewater and solid waste such as batteries. To achieve the goal of low carbon separation, we focus on electrified approaches to reduce chemical production and transportation, such as designing electrochemical separation processes, and electrifying conventional chemical-driven processes like ion exchange.
Selective materials
Process-level evaluation will help to identify new separation materials that enhance the removal and recovery efficiency of target species. Removal indicates separation of target species from streams onto functional materials, with removal efficiency primarily affected by material selectivity. Recovery indicates species elution from materials, with recovery efficiency determined by material regenerability. We develop selective and regenerable materials such as polymeric composites with different functional groups and dopants for separating various target ions and molecules.
Devices and systems
Our ultimate research goal is to not only develop breakthrough technologies, but also breakthrough solutions. We facilitate technology diffusion by conducting pilot-scale studies with modular devices and systems. Pilot studies provide realistic data on system cost, energy consumption, and carbon emissions to support practical life cycle assessment (LCA) and techno-economic analysis (TEA) for process scale-up. To accelerate technology diffusion, we aim to establish collaborations with global practitioners to deliver impactful solutions for environmental challenges.