 Good afternoon, and welcome to this month's Boiler Engineers fireside chat. I'm Chuck Davidson, 1972 alumni of the School of Chemical Engineering and serving as host of this month's virtual event. Hopefully you've attended some of the prior fireside chats. The purpose of these chats is to highlight the work taking place within the College of Engineering and the importance that work is in moving us towards research driven and results oriented programming that are drivers of our universities and in colleges reputation. Prior events had covered such topics as the innovation ecosystem at Purdue, our pharmaceutical research and engineering's role in the Purdue's innovation campus. Today, we're going to discuss the College of Engineering's giant leaps to move engineering research into the marketplace. And as a shining example of that, we'll have his guests later in the program, Professor Linda Wang from the School of Chemical Engineering and Dan Hasler, president of Hasler Ventures, who will be speaking on their work. First, just a housekeeping on him, you can see it up in the chat box. We just want to make sure this is as interactive as possible to allow you to ask questions, just use the chat feature to post your questions. We have set aside throughout this event for Q&A. Next, I'll be turning the program over to Dean Meng Chang. To this audience, Dean Chang needs no introduction. He has produced executive vice president for strategic initiatives reporting directly to President Daniels and the Johnny Edwards and Dean of the College of Engineering. Since joining us as Dean in 2017, Meng's leadership over the College of Engineering has been truly driving us towards the pinnacle of excellence at scale. Some of you may have just seen where Purdue's engineering graduate program was recently ranked number four in the country, moving up three positions in just one year. So with that, let me turn it over to Dean Chang for his opening comments. Thank you so much, Chuck. Great to see you. And it's an honor to have you as the host of this month, virtual fireside with Boilermaker engineers, friends, families, alumni, and we're indeed very excited to have a conversation about this topic from research to marketplace. So I thank you for doing a bit of my typical advertisement with Boiler Pride on the pinnacle of excellence at scale. And I think that as a land-grant university, in addition to learning and research, we do also have a special responsibility and opportunity to take some of our fundamental research breakthroughs into the marketplace and benefit the industry, society and large. So I'm eager to have a dialogue with you first, the Chuck and answer maybe some of your questions and then answer some of the questions from our audience before we turn the mic over to the featured speakers today. Oh, great. And thank you so much for this opportunity. And what an opportunity it is to hear your thoughts about the progress that is happening there at Purdue and the College of Engineering and maybe maybe just to start, you know, maybe you can just provide a little bit more on your thoughts on the importance of companies and industry partners play within college's research efforts. Yep, certainly. I think that there are two sides to this issue. And one is, indeed, there are certain research breakthroughs that deserves to be given a chance to translate into either IP or products or maybe a whole new enterprise, a company or nonprofit. But then there's the other side of the coin that perhaps is just as important. And that is often the translation process sharpens the fundamental research and benefits the teaching of the material to students. And one example, in one of my own startups at a previous institution, I did was on the wireless communications along with the team, we had together, we had the first set of investor money, we had the first set of customers. And now it's blossomed into serving about 60 million users around the world, mostly in developing countries to help bridge the digital divide in 4G and 5G wireless networks. And it's tremendously satisfying to see how the equations got used by people. And it's also very beneficial for me and my team as researchers and as teachers. And the translation process forced us back to the Blackboard many times to revisit some of the assumptions we had to make in our work, fundamental research and publications and sharpen the model, the results, the algorithms, the protocols. It also made us better teachers. As we teach undergrad and graduate students in wireless communications, I will be able to borrow from the experiences I had in leading this company and understanding the marketplace and how that might impact the way that we can understand and appreciate the textbook material for the students future careers. And I believe a similar kind of synergy between research teaching on the one hand and the process of taking it to the market to also exist in many of the other companies that we are seeing here at Purdue. You know, I along with our audience, I'm very excited to hear the message from Professor Wang later in this program, as well as from Dan Hasler, that you know, regarding her work on such as turning plastics into fuels, and of course, the important topic of a rare earth metals separation. Maybe just stepping aside from that for a minute, could you talk about some of the other research areas within the college that you see as presenting opportunities that might yield, you know, similar results and similar collaborations and avenues for creating other partnerships? Well, indeed, Chuck, you know, there are many outstanding faculty here at Purdue Engineering. And not all of them need to participate in this translation process. Not all of them are interested, which is absolutely fine. I think excellence in research comes in many different shapes and colors, and we appreciate different formats of excellence. However, there is an increasing number of them who are interested in trying this out, either by licensing the technology, and working with bigger companies, or by creating their own enterprise, forming a team to execute the ideas directly to the end users, whether they are enterprise users or consumer users. So examples range from energetic material and hypersonics on the national security front, to AI and machine learning products, to digital agriculture products, to different types of imaging solutions. And today, we'll soon be hearing from one of the, say, crown droos of these translational efforts from Professor Wang and from Dan Hasler. But I think across the board, throughout all the departments and schools in Purdue Engineering, we can find faculty members from system professors to chair professors who are engaged in these translation. Just another topic that I think our audience would be interested in. And I mentioned that at the opening about the recent ranking of the graduate program at Purdue. And of course, there have been a number of other recognitions of the College of Engineering. And it really strikes me in a national ranking that you could move three positions in one year. That is astounding. And I think, as you've made the point before, to be at the number four position at the scale that Purdue Engineering is, is quite unique. I think, you know, I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on how this is happening. And, you know, what are the drivers behind it? And where do you see it? See it going? Well, Chuck, I think the ranking really follows reputation. And what we're seeing in any magazine's annual enumeration is a reflection of the outstanding work by all the faculty members, their students and our staff. And it's a reflection of their individual accomplishments and the institution gets to enjoy that reflection. The graduate and research ranking in particular puts a bit of emphasis on the research productivity and competitive, extramural research awards, as well as publication, citation, and the general concept of reputation by peers and proper partners. And we have been always in a very strong position, especially considering that we are not on the coast, not in the city, not with a medical school, we are the only one in the top 10, top 12, over the past many years, that's of that type. But in particular recent years, our faculty are garnering so many awards, and the research productivity continues to climb. And there's been so many national research centers that we competed for. And one, that it's only, I think, a natural and accurate reflection of that in the latest ranking. And you mentioned, there are also some other rankings out there, one of which is quite fitting to today's topic is the ranking of the number of startup companies that license a university's IP. And I know that Dan Hasler as the former president of Purdue Research Foundation, and one of the key movers along with President Mitch Daniels over the years, feel a great sense of satisfaction to see that according to that metric, last year Purdue University as a whole was ranked, I think, number six in the world, and maybe number three in the United States. And the College of Engineering faculty, I think, are proud to contribute to about 75% of those startup companies. And another ranking that just came out is the Wall Street Journal ranking on the number of patents received from the US Patent and Trademark Office by any university around the world. And in that ranking, Purdue University as a whole was ranked this year number six in the world. And that includes, however, UC and UT as two university systems with multiple research intensive campuses and hospitals. And then that also includes Stanford and Johns Hopkins, both of which have outstanding healthcare systems. So looking at those that are really one main research campus without a medical school, Purdue ranked right below MIT and above everybody else. And the College of Engineering faculty contributed to 64% of those patents. So I think there are many ways we can look at this. Quantification, no matter how crude and approximate they might be, they do reflect the strength of our talent and the results of their success. You've been experiencing some exciting growth in the College of Engineering here very recently. And I understand that the fall enrollment is quite large. How are you adjusting to that? I mean, it's an amazing growth. And it has a lot of implications. But how are you taking that on? And what maybe are some of the reasons why Purdue is being so successful in recruiting these outstanding new students? Yes. Well, Chuck, indeed, if we were to host you here in person, you would see right now at this moment outside my office in Armstrong Hall of Engineering, a lot of young men and women who are running between classes. And we have classes started for about two weeks now. And people are wearing masks indoors and making sure we keep everybody safe. It is exciting to see the largest ever incoming class to the university and also to the College of Engineering. The number is over 3,000 first year engineers that we have welcomed warmly to our campus to make our undergrad population collectively to be 10,700 and that's not counting the agricultural biological engineering majors. And we also have 4,000 master PhD students on campus and another 2,500 or so online. So that makes us actually the largest enrollment ever to be ranked in the top five of the country in any discipline in history. While we are very proud to welcome all the students from around the country and around the world. We also do want to make sure that there's adequate resource support and sufficient individualization to make their learning experience of the highest caliber to now I think the frozen tuition and the safe reopening of campus last year both contributed a lot and the ranking and the reputation out there also helps. It's not easy to find another institution with outstanding engineering program at this tuition and fee rate with this much focus on their learning programs and with a ranking as high as we have here at Purdue engineering. Frankly, I cannot think of another institution with a better collection of these metrics. So we now have the responsibility to make sure that we have sufficient numbers of instructors, professors, advisors, TAs and lab spaces. The gateway complex opening next year will be helpful. And Chuck, I have to say that we are also agilely reforming our curricula. We are putting together the experiential learning outside of classrooms through the GRIT program, GRIT for global research industry co-op and team based the project's learning experience. Because after all, it's not just about how much we cover, but how much we uncover with the students together is a passage of self exploration and personal growth. Well, immensely proud of all the bottom maker students want to serve them well, want to give them a rigorous education and also making sure that they will be able to personally grow. We have this underestimate of the yield rate, which is in part what led to a surprisingly large number of students. And we have estimated yield to be historic level. It turns out to be breaking a brand new record, meaning that there are more students and parents voting with their feet coming to Purdue Engineering than we thought there would be. We're going to have to adjust that, by the way, to make sure that the growth will be also well controlled and fully supported. Great. I see we've got a question at the chat. So maybe I'll switch to that. And the question is, does Purdue have current statistics on the success rate, either in terms of mergers, acquisitions or IPOs of startups, either from licensing of Purdue intellectual property or as spin-offs through Purdue's own incubation platforms for the past, and the question goes five, 10 years. Through these data, any insights on potential missing links or areas to be improved so that Purdue ecosystem outside could be of great help? In other words, a broader question about just what's our sense of the success of these companies we're partnering with? Well, Chuck, you know this better than many of us as a leader in the energy sector, innovation and investment that sometimes it takes a bit of time and patience to see the return on the investment in certain types of startups. And Dan Hasler, in a few minutes, will have the mic and tell us more about the history of how he and Mitch Daniels thought about ways to improve entrepreneurship here at Purdue, starting just about a few years ago, I would say. So I think the druid and the verdict still out, we need to perhaps wait a couple more years to see the full statistics on the exit, merger, acquisition, IPO and so on. But I do know that at least anecdotally that we have a lot of companies that are getting additional investment. Now, it is important to recognize that we cannot walk alone in this endeavor. It is slightly unnatural in fact, for a university like Purdue to be so successful in entrepreneurship. And we need to take it to the next level by partnering with many out there, including investors, but also those who can help complete the teams. And the number one lesson that I learned as an entrepreneur myself is the who before the what. And often is the team is the people that investors are betting on. Everybody can come up with powerful PowerPoints and beautiful ideas. It is the team that can execute a pivot, listen to the market and fail fast enough that can eventually deliver the returns. So I think we absolutely need both here in West Lafayette Indiana in general, as well as in other hubs where our alumni live. So on the highlight, for example, the John Martinson Center for Engineering Entrepreneurship, thanks to John Martinson, another wonderful bottom maker who gave us a gift to support students. I know that Purdue Research Foundation has certain activities here on campus. And recently, we opened a new incubator in the Silicon Valley. The location, the address is 635 Bryant Street in Palo Alto. So Bryant Street is a little bit just off of from the Main Street in downtown Palo Alto. And this is a co-working space that Purdue put together and a welcome. Not only our current student faculty, but also the alumni companies to use the space. And what we really need is that densification of connectedness across talents, capital and the management teams. So there's a lot more that we can do and must do, still miles away, I think, from achieving the full potential of the bottom maker's potential impact to the marketplace. Well, Dean Cheng, we really appreciate your your insights today. That's a that's a great overview of of not only the College of Engineering and some of the exciting things that are being done, but also particularly on this topic of how we partnership with entrepreneurs outside the University to leverage the intellectual property that we're developing and and help, as you say, hone it and and get it ready for market. So I think at this stage of the program, maybe I will turn it back to you so that we could hear from our guests. Thank you, Chuck. Well, now it's my distinct honor to introduce fantastic colleague and faculty from the Davidson School of Chemical Engineering. Chuck was too modest to mention that the full name of our Chemical Engineering School is the Davidson School. Thanks to an outstanding gift from Chuck and his family. And Linda Wang is a chair professor in the Davidson School of Chemical Engineering and incredibly gifted, talented researcher, teacher and entrepreneur, especially in the space of separation technology. And I had had to learn a lot in order to fully understand the professor Wang's inventions and research articles in separation. And there are many applications, one of which is rare earth metals and elements. And then there's also conversion of plastics from waste to useful products and the implications to environmental protection to national security to industries ranging from a semiconductor to aerospace is tremendous when it comes to the rare earth. And the other co guest speaker today, well, we're lucky today to have two guest speakers tagging team is Linda's team mate, Mr. Dan Hasler alluded to that Dan was the president of Purdue Research Foundation and really the driver of the overall entrepreneurial innovation ecosystem at Purdue. And recently, he stepped down from that position, trying to retire, the Brian Adam and took over. Some of you met Brian, one of the fireside chats before. But I guess retirement doesn't fit Dan's personality. And now Dan is working with Professor Wang in commercializing the exciting technologies for rare earth separation. So I'm going to turn the mic and the slide you to Dan and Linda, please. So can I share the screen? Can you see the screen? Yes, we can Linda. Thank you. Great. Yeah, thank you so much for inviting me to be part of this chat. So somehow I was talking to talk about two important grand challenges, the plastic waste problem and producing high purity rare earth in the US. And I'm happy to be here to report to you what our contributions are. And hopefully we have some promising results in the future in solving these grand challenges. So so the slide. Okay, so first, I'd like to talk about plastic fuels. And I want to tell you about the plastic pollution problem. And I want to raise three key questions. Number one, will the planet be inhabitable by 2050? Number two, can we afford to clean up the oceans and landfills? Number three, can we save the planet in time? I don't have definitive answers to these questions. But I just want to bring to your attention these three important problems. And then I'm going to talk to you about the Purdue Technology on hydrothermal processing for converting plastics to fuels, and some potential impact and the very short conclusion. So some of you might have seen this giant to Texas size the garbage patches in the Pacific oceans. But unfortunately, this is a small tip of the iceberg of the total plastic waste. So the first deepest dive into the Mariana trench 36,000 feet deep, the scientists didn't find any exotic organisms. They found a plastic bag. And actually plastics and plastic waste and micro plastics are everywhere, from the Arctic Ocean floor to all the way to the micro plastic in the snow from the Alps. And actually, you can find micro plastics in land, freshwater and oceans. You can find them in beach sands, sea salts, fish, seabirds. And this plastic pollution kills about 100,000 marine mammals per year. And pretty soon you're going to find them on the food on your consumer plates. So this is a very concerning problem because we have produced 8 billion metric tons of plastic waste by 2015. And 76% of the waste is landfill, 12% incinerated, and less than 9% was recycled, reused, and 3% went up in the oceans. And the question is, if we continue business as usual, we'll have more plastic waste than fish in the oceans. So this currently the current technologies like incineration or mechanical recycling have not been effective for reducing the waste accumulation. And the plastic waste degrades slowly over centuries. So that's why you see micro plastics everywhere. And from our preliminary estimate, this will take 10,000 times the global GDP to clean up the oceans, which we can definitely not afford. So it's very critical to convert the plastic waste to use for products. Hopefully this will create a driving force to reduce the plastic waste accumulation associated with pollution. So we have been studying this hydrothermal processing of plastic waste to fuels. We think this may be a good idea. So you put plastic waste at subcritical supercritical water in the reactor, with the temperature 250 to 500 degrees Celsius at the pressure of one to 30 megapascal. And 90% of this plastic waste can become oil and the rest 10% will become gas and solid additives who are recovered separately and the water can be recycled and reused. So for example, this one example, the polyethylene waste, this is type two type four, this is your plastic bags and milk jugs and containers. And the type five plastic waste is polypropylene waste. And these are the the caps of your drinks and the other yogurt containers. And if you put this mixture into this hydrothermal processing reactor, the 90% of these plastic will become oil and we can use a simple separation to separate to clean gasoline and clean diesel. If you have a polyethylene waste plastic bags, we can convert them into clean wax. So the oils from this hydrothermal processing, after separation to gasoline and diesel fractions, we have checked the carbon number distribution and the types of chemicals in this mixture. And you can see that our gasoline products are very similar to that of the commercial gasoline and our diesel product in terms of carbon distribution of types of chemicals are also very similar to the commercial diesel. So we also checked the properties of these products. And we find that the gasoline fraction can meet all the requirements for ultra low sulfur gasoline in this left diagram. So if the properties all these properties fell into the green region, that means the met requirements if the data points fell into the red regions, that means they're not qualified for the product. So you can see that both the gasoline products and diesel products have met all the requirements for gasoline or diesel fuels. And this is also very energy efficient. This energy required for conversion is much lower than producing the fuels from pyrolysis or from crude oil in a conventional way and the much more efficient than recycling this polymers to again mechanical recycling. And this is has a little bit more energy consumption than incineration. However, incineration generates a lot of CO2. So it's not desirable. If you look at the greenhouse gas emissions of this process, our process is also the lowest compared to fuels from pyrolysis or for producing fuels from crude oil in the conventional way. So the point is that this process energy efficient and environmentally friendly. And this process can also convert, as I said, from polyethylene waste into clean wax or the type one PET waste into monomers. And so the this has other processes that didn't have time to get into, but potentially this hydrothermal process can convert 60 to 80% of the property was into use for products. And this will recover $100 billion of gasoline diesel fuels from the polyethylene products and 14 billion monomers for from type one plastic waste. And in this process, we reduce the CO2 emission by one to six tons per ton of plastic waste converted. And we can reduce the crude oil consumption for producing the gasoline diesel fuels. And we can achieve circular use of materials. And we can reduce the risk of plastic pollution to the environment and potential of human health. So can we save the planet in time? I don't know the answer, but I think you can help by replace, reduce and recycle. And we must increase the current recycle rate from less than 10% to greater than 80% to make a difference in the plastic waste accumulation. I encourage you not to mix plastics with trash because retrieving the plastic from from landfills is a very costly. And the clean sorted plastic waste gives the highest profit in the processing. And we must have new public policies laws incentives for reducing plastic waste. And we must have improved our infrastructures for waste collection and processing. So in the future, we hope to change this current linear path from crude oil to refinery into chemicals and chemical plants into plastic products and after use into landfills or incinerators or the oceans will changes linear path into a more circular path. We can collect the waste and process in this process and separate by simple distillation into clean diesel clean gasoline fuels or in other cases we can produce pure clean wax. We can also produce oil and this will be sent back to the refineries and to re re made into monomers and then reuse those monomers to synthesize the the plastic products. So quickly jumps fish gear to about the purification of rare earth elements from waste magnets and mineral ores. So I want to tell you that why the rare earth elements are critical materials they're in shortage. And why China has the monopoly of the high purity rare earth elements at this time. And how the Purdue innovation based on chromatography, which is versatile scalable and for design optimization scale up can produce high purity rare earth from waste magnets and mineral concentrates. And I hope you come to the conclusion to be optimistic that this innovation is a solution to our massive future supply crunch. So rare earth elements are the 70 elements on the periodic table they make material stronger, lighter, better and tools smaller, more efficient and more powerful. I'll just give you a few examples. Your motors on the electric vehicles and the generators on the windmill and these are made from three rare earth elements and the your energy saving light bulbs are used several of the rare earth elements and your TV screens requires at least two of the rare earth elements that the european european gives the bright brilliant red and the turban gives you the bright green color and your catalytic converter requires at least two of the rare earth elements. So the rare earth elements are also important for defense applications for targeting for weapons for communication for guidance control electric motors, jet engines and as an example your fighter jet requires more than 900 pounds of rare earth elements, your destroyers requires more than 5 000 pounds and your submarine requires more than 9 000 pounds of rare earth elements. So about 30 percent by weight of the rare earth elements are used for making permanent magnets and these represents about 80 percent of the total market value around rare earth and these are in your hard drive and your electric motors, your NMR machines and your generators wind turbines and it's according to this projection there's a huge growing demand of the rare earth magnets you know shown here you can see that by 2035 a large fraction of the magnets are used in the electric vehicles or small cars or wind turbines or generators and the rest of the market is also following a similar trend. The current rare earth supply chain starts from mineral ores a lot after a lot of hard work of digging, processing, concentrating and producing these concentrates and then they're further going through very elaborate separation processes to become high- purity rare earth materials and this represents about eight billion dollars per year for rare earth pure rare earth elements and these but after they make into finished products the value is more than four trillion dollars per year. So the supply risk is the follows so the economy is already projected the dominance of China in terms of minerals or in terms of pure rare earth materials and the manufacturing components of high-tech products the most worrisome is this red projection by 2040 China can manufacture over 80-90% of the high-tech products so many economists consider this a major failure of the U.S defense industrial policy and China's monopoly of the rare earth supplies for the following reasons China has the largest rare earth reserves and Deng Xiaoping famously said in 1992 Middle East has oil but China has rare earth and since then they made a very large government investment in the infrastructures and the production of the rare earth elements and China has the lowest energy cost lowest labor cost and motivated workers and they have low environmental standards for these reasons China can produce the rare earth at the lowest global production cost about 50% lower than anywhere else for this reason there's there are no high-purity rare earth production in the U.S at present so the challenges of producing high-purity rare earth from ores are the following so most of the 17 rare earth elements existing together as a mixture in ores at very low concentrations a few parts per million and they have similar properties they have the same valence similar size and similar chemical and physical properties and the old the conventional technology is the use of an extraction which requires about a thousand mixture several units just to separate two rare earth elements like this and the worst problem is the discharge of the hazardous waste in the lake so in China in the Inner Mongolia which was considered one of the 10 most polluted sites in the world and producing innovation is to replace solvent extraction by chromatography separation and the chromatography has orders of magnitude higher interfacial area for mass transfer per unit area give you the example one equivalent stage in solvent extraction is about one meters in the dimensions whereas one equivalent stage in chromatography is only one meter in height which can have I mean 1,000 state equivalent stages so it's much more efficient system and chromatography separation over earth you know in the commercial cannot exchange sorbents unfortunately they don't have selectivity so the chelation sorbents which have selectivity but have are very expensive and with limited stability so we have developed the method based on low-cost sorbents and selective ligands in the mobile phase and which have broad selectivities for rare earth elements so to give you a very brief introduction what is a chromatography so you can imagine the the metal ions are students are dressed in pink say undergraduate students okay and and you have tango dancers which have very peculiar preference for dancing with different guests with different colors for example the edta has a great preference for people dressed in in blue let's say alums Purdue alums okay and second preference is the graduate students who are dressed in gold third preference is the students undergraduate student dressed in pink and the least preference least preferred partner is the under is the high school students let's say dressing green and now if you want to separate the graduate students undergraduate students high school students and we can design a system definition system okay just imagine if the davison school of chemical engineering building is a hundred floors in height and we can have an alumni party reception party full of foods and then we can uh let's say the building is fully occupied by the visiting alums they're dressed in blue okay then we bring in the group of students which are dressed the graduate student undergraduate student and the high school students they're dressed in different colors and these students were quickly displaced alarm to occupy the top floor okay near the entry point and then we can bring in this tango dancers into the building and imagine this tango dancers would most prefer to dance with the gold students and the pink students and the green students in that preference order and if this process continues you'll see that pretty soon because the gold students spend more time dancing with the dancers and they are escalators only going downward in one direction into the bottom of the floor and this peculiar elevator system will bring the gold students ahead of the pink students and the ahead of the green students and as the as soon as the tango dancer sees the blue dress the alarm dressed in blue uh he she will immediately drop off the gold students and start dancing with the the blue students the blue alums okay so you can imagine this process proceeds and pretty soon you'll see that the the davidson school or chemical junior building will be separated into four zones the alarm zone and the the graduate student zone undergraduate student zone and high school student zone at this process you're patient waiting at the exit of the bottom of the chemical engineering you can see the the exit of the exit of the the groups in terms of graduate students in terms of undergraduate students and high school students so i hope this this example helps you to understand what is a chromatography so the second technology is we have very versatile efficient and scale scalable design method and simulation tools so once we have the feed and system specs and we can measure intrinsic parameters which are independent of the size of the scale of this operation or the feed composition and we can use the design simulation tools to design the operating conditions in the system and we can use this checking between this experimental results with the simulation predictions and and if they're in agreement then we can scale up for pilot testing and further for commercial testing so we think this technology is has potential to change the current linear path of the magnet materials so right now as you know the mineral ores are you know gone through very extensive concentrating and separation processes produce high purity three elements and then they are made into magnets and other earth products at the end of the life 99 percent of this went to landfills and this is a terrible wasteful because you lost three billion dollars worth of rare earth materials to landfills and the associated embodied energy of 10 million barrels of crude oil equivalent per year so hopefully this technology will change the linear path to a more economical circular path of the rare earth so if we can collect the waste magnets and we can use our process to produce high purity rare earth elements which can be remade into useful products again and the life will be collected and processed and this means savings of 95 percent of the rare earth elements collected and we can save almost seven million barrels of oil crude oil for processing per year so this is the example of let's say hard disk drive magnets we dissolve them into by electrochemical and other methods and ph adjusted and then the solution will fit into the chromatography column and produce high purity rare earth elements so for example to separate the three rare earth elements in the waste magnets we only have two zones and a few four columns okay so what you do is in zone one you put in the feed mixture loading and removed impurities connecting this with purification column put in edta and this exit is the mainly the nd band and the two side bands dy nd and ndpr and then this makes the bands are further sent into another column to separate in the purity y nd and the ndpr band was separated nd and pr in this column so this is a very high purity high yield process another example is to produce the high purity rare earth from basina size from mountain pass california right now a mountain pass has about one and a half million tons of rare earth reserve and currently they're sending 38 000 tons of the concentrate to china for purification so basically the rock gone through extensive processes to get a concentrate and then sent to china for further purification and we took a sample of this and using the Purdue technology to produce the following four high purity samples these are the major components of this this concentrate latin and cerium prosodinium neodymium so the advantages of Purdue technologies are the following first is safer because we're only using aqueous solutions and dilute acid and base compared to solvent extraction with flammable sorvents solvents toxic tractants and harsh chemicals and the chemical causes are lower and we have higher purity and yield of products and the productivity is at least 10 times higher as a result of the footprint of the process one tenth of the solvent extraction the startup shutdown is also very quick it's in terms of days rather than weeks and the feedstocks and products we can do the separation so many different feedstocks and different products and it's much more flexible approach and the separators in the separating of four rare earth elements we only need five columns whereas in the conventional they will require almost two thousand mixer separate units and the initial investment they should be one-fifth of the solvent extraction and we only produce a little bit sodium chloride as the waste and this can be recycled back to acid and base using the conventional chloro alkaline process so it's much cleaner so in conclusion i would say the Purdue technologies are based on fundamental theories and simulation tools and for this reason they can be easily adaptable to different feedstocks different products and different production scales and we're shown here the results shown that we're able to produce rare earth from waste magnets and ores at lab scale so after this thing being scaled up i think this can be a safer cleaner more efficient more economical process and solvent extraction and the american resources is building their first commercial scale chromatography plant in fissure indiana if you have any questions you can talk to dan or mark jensen from this company and we hope that this is a potential for sustainable and circular rare earth economy as shown before so i hope in the next shed i'll have the opportunity to tell you that rare earth elements are no longer rare in the united states so of course these work are done by graduate students and supported by in part by the school of chemical engineering and department defense and the Purdue safety center and mr mrs bill smith gift fund and the critical research institute japan supporting the plastic waste project and special thanks to dan hasler which recruited american resources corporations and medallion resources in supporting this process and in the commercial scale pilot testing and scale up so thank you very much for your attention i'll be happy to answer any questions and then we'll help to answer any questions as well oh thank you so much linda that is an amazing lecture we learned a lot now we only got about five minutes here but maybe we can handle a couple of the questions uh between you and dan please so i see one question here what is the largest the separator this ever been named the you mean in terms of chromatography so yeah the largest was for the you know uo p largest is 10 meters in diameter yeah 10 meters in diameters and more than 10 meters in height in chromatography separation of para xiling from method xiling ortho xiling those are the largest chromatography columns mating for other separations thanks another question can chromatology be used for lithium extraction yes definitely that's what we are looking at right now so the lithium ion batteries we are in the process producing data to prove this lithium can be separated with nickel cobalt manganese used in the lithium ion batteries which is you know used in electric vehicles so to provide energy so yes this is the ongoing project sponsored by the american resources and the preliminary results are quite promising because the same chromatography principles equation simulation tools can be used for that important separation as well thanks uh have uh plated rare earth manganese being uh yes okay so this depending on the digestion methods uh in some clean digestion methods like in hydrothermal processing the the the coating will fail off and the the magnets will be pulverized into a very fine powder and very easily dissolved in the weak acid and then for the chromatography separation yes we are we are looking we are working on that the method as well in comparison with the electrolytic process great i'm gonna ask the last question for this uh virtual farce that to dan hasler uh and any other comments that may you may have the question is when will mass commercialization occur for both expected methods dan i you know i would expect you know we've got to prove this thing out at a commercial lab scale that will be the de-risking event that causes us to be able to bring the big dollars in to build the commercial plants um you know you'd like to think five to six years from now if not sooner we could be at a commercial scale and begin to alleviate this monopoly that we're suffering at from china you know i want to also point out that you know in my 40 year career i have never had more fun than representing Purdue technologies to the marketplace and the reason that i mentioned that is i know there are people on this call that could have just as much fun doing this the scarce ingredient to success to the question that was asked earlier the scarce ingredient for Purdue to get to the next level honestly are business people people who can learn about technology like linda's and translate it into a storyline that represents and describes its value and potential value and potential economics to non-technical people that's basically what i do for this technology and and you know you kiss a lot of frogs in the meantime but that's there's tons of opportunities for alums to do this at Purdue well we'll welcome your interest please email me for example i'll make sure your inquiry is forwarded to the upper faculty or prf colleagues and then best in 40 years congratulations to you and linda and then you must have started working for Purdue at age one i'm gonna give the mic of the last minute back to our wonderful host chuck devison chuck thank you again uh chuck you are still muted you're a magician uh chuck allowed me to can you hear me now yes i was i was locked out i i muted myself and the host decided that was a good idea so i stayed unmuted i stayed muted but again uh for our guests uh dean shang it's been a real pleasure to be a part of this fireside chat once again we're learning about so many exciting things that are being developed at Purdue engineering and the great accomplishments of the staff and our partners have on this program and also dean shang thanks again for your leadership we're just really excited on the path that the college has had it thank you again chuck and thank you all for joining us here thank you linda dan and see you next month coming up right around the corner of virtual fireside thank you so much bye bye