The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to enable an environmentally sustainable, carbon-dioxide emission-free process for the iron and steel industry. The novel process operates at relatively low temperatures allowing the process to start and stop on demand, thereby enabling seamless integration with intermittent renewable resources, like solar and wind energy. The process can use widely available low-grade iron ores not commonly used in steelmaking today due to high impurity content. Furthermore, the process uses only iron ore and renewable electricity as a feedstock. Thus, the process plant is easily co-located with mining operations to eliminate the logistics and carbon emissions from shipping iron ore, supporting the domestic iron and steelmaking industries. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will validate the feasibility of a novel carbon dioxide emission-free iron-making process. The proposed solution leverages intermittent renewable energy to convert iron ore to iron metal via an electrochemical process. The objectives of this project are to 1) develop a process to convert the solid iron ore to a liquid electrolyte suitable for efficient iron extraction in a subsequent step, 2) demonstrate high faradaic efficiency for materials regeneration in a continuous closed-loop process, 3) build a novel electrochemical device with total specific energy consumption comparable to the energy intensity of the conventional process. The approach combines a fundamental understanding of iron ore dissolution kinetics with a novel electrochemical regeneration scheme to enhance iron ore dissolution and enable efficient iron extraction. The project will seek to understand the impact of key process variables and iron ore impurities on performance and stability. It is anticipated that the core innovation will lead to a novel process of reducing iron ore to high-purity iron for steelmaking. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
