INNOVATION DAY 2024 | Chemical Engineering

Advised by Ryan Ravenelle, Lithium Americas Corp.

Students: Aisling Rovarino, Stephanie Werth, Mack Edinger, Arthur Ramirez

Many mining companies use sulfuric acid to recover valuable metals. An example is Lithium Americas Corp. whose planned process to produce battery-grade lithium carbonate creates a magnesium sulfate byproduct. The goal of this project is to find a method to recycle the sulfur in the magnesium sulfur back into sulfuric acid. This will improve the sustainability of the Lithium Americas process and reduce the amount of sulfur the company must purchase for producing sulfuric acid.  

Advised by Jared Olson and Sammee Davis, McClelland Laboratories 

Students: Adam Georgeson, Wyatt Haag, Jose Regalado, Samantha Thompson  

The purpose of this project is to identify precious metals in a copper mines raffinate stream and design a recovery process for the any metals with a concentration high enough. 

Advised by Nolan Erickson, Albemarle Corporation

Students: Thomas Hamby, Isaac Harrison, Nathan Merkle, Mitchell Rathbun

This project entails redesigning a portion of Albemarle's Silver Peak Lithium mine. Currently, the mine refines its brine with a batch process, which greatly reduces material throughput and operating time. Converting the batch process into a continuous process would increase the lithium produced by Albemarle by a reasonable margin.

Advised by Truckee Meadows Water Reclamation

Students: Anjali Bhatia, Jayce Esplin, Cora Douglas, Rowan Loranz

This project involves designing a process to produce hydrogen from biosolids. This hydrogen will be used to power RTC buses.
The goal of this project is to design a process which converts the waste products at TMWRF into usable fuel for the new RTC buses. The process will utilize hydrothermal carbonization, gasification, reforming, and urification. Hydrothermal carbonization is beneficial to the process as the biosolids do not have to be dried anywhere in the process. This saves a very energy and time intensive step in the process when compared to other methods of biosolid conversion. The main challenges of the project are determining the amount of hydrogen that can be converted from biosolids and biogas from TMWRF, and whether this hydrogen can be produced economically for RTC.

Students: Sean Akers, Aidan Perrin, Matt Long, Jared Keller

Our team explored the process of extracting biogas from digested waste and converting it into hydrogen for RTC fuel cell buses in a way that is both economically viable and efficient. The process begins with amine scrubbing, a method used to purify the methane from biogas by removing impurities like carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. Once purified, the methane undergoes steam methane reforming (SMR), where it reacts with steam at high temperatures to produce syngas, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. This is followed by the water-gas shift reaction, which further converts carbon monoxide and steam into additional hydrogen. Finally, a pressure swing adsorption (PSA) unit is employed to purify the hydrogen, separating it from any remaining impurities to ensure high purity. By optimizing these unit operations, we aimed to maximize the hydrogen yield while keeping costs and environmental impact low. This method provides a sustainable and cost-effective pathway to produce hydrogen from biogas, supporting cleaner and more efficient public transportation with RTC fuel cell buses.