Andrei Fedorov and his team have found a way to take some of the guesswork out of mass spectrometry imaging (MSI), potentially giving scientists better tools to explore the molecules that influence our health.
A small sample of human tissue can hold a remarkable amount of information.
Researchers can use it to search for molecular clues associated with cancer, investigate the chemical landscape of the brain, or determine where a drug travels after it enters the body. Mass spectrometry imaging, or MSI, helps answer those questions by mapping where different molecules are located within tissue.
But there's a catch. Despite MSI's sophisticated capabilities, finding the right conditions to get useful results can still require a considerable amount of trial and error. Georgia Tech professor Andrei Fedorov and Ph.D. student John Sentmanat are working to change that.
“Mass spectrometry imaging is probably the most powerful tool to enable new discoveries in cell biology and protein biochemistry. It helps provide a direct insight not only to how the body works but also the underlying cause of disease,” said Fedorov, Associate Chair for Graduate Studies and Rae S. and Frank H. Neely Chair in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “But the techniques for using it were evolving in a very empirical manner guided by experience and intuition. It’s like shooting arrows in the dark.”
In response to this barrier, the team has developed what Fedorov likens to a recipe, a framework designed to help researchers understand how different ingredients and conditions work together to produce the molecular information they want. Published in Analytical Chemistry, the approach could make MSI more predictable and give scientists a better starting point for developing new ways to study the molecular workings of the human body.
“This paper provides a very simple recipe that everyone can read and use. You don’t need to be a chef, or in this case, be able to write complicated equations,” Fedorov said. “It even allows you to come up with a new recipe using our model as the base.”
Though the framework was designed to be accessible to researchers across the field, Fedorov and Sentmanat didn’t set out to solve a problem for the scientific community — they were trying to solve one in their own lab.
In 2020, Fedorov, who is also a faculty member in the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, was awarded $1.2 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the development of a new imaging instrument that could change the study of tumor growth, disease progression, and cell function.
The technology, called BeamMap, has continued to develop with additional support from the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Cell Manufacturing Technologies (CMaT), led in part by Georgia Tech. By bringing together multiple imaging techniques, including MSI, BeamMap allows researchers to study both the physical surface of a biological sample and its molecular makeup.
While developing the instrument, Fedorov and Sentmanat encountered the same challenge that has made MSI difficult to optimize: Under some conditions, they successfully extracted the molecules they wanted to study. Under others, they damaged a sample without getting the information they needed. Rather than continue relying on trial and error, the team decided they needed a theory that could point them toward the right conditions.
“As we continued developing the instrument, we realized we needed to develop a theory to identify the optimal operating conditions,” Sentmanat said. “What began as an effort to fine-tune our own technology led to a broader theory that can be applied to a wide range of other approaches.”
To build the recipe, the team returned to the basic physics that determines when molecules leave a sample and become available for detection. They distilled those complex interactions into a simpler framework, then compared its predictions with experimental data from previously published studies. When the framework held up across different MSI approaches, the researchers realized the recipe could be useful well beyond their own lab.
“It's all measurable data that any scientist in this field would be able to use,” Fedorov said. “It’s like having a magic tool that allows you, all of a sudden, not to be blind.”
Fedorov sees the new framework as one step toward making MSI easier to understand and use. By giving researchers a better starting point for choosing how to operate an MSI system, the recipe could help them spend less time searching for the right conditions and more time using the technology to answer biological questions.
That could become increasingly important as medicine moves toward understanding disease and treatment at the molecular level.
“More and more, physicians base their diagnoses on much more specific molecular information,” Fedorov said. “The drugs of the future will not be this little pill that you will be given; they will be your own immune cells. Your diagnostic tools have to match that future.”
For now, the framework is intended primarily as a tool for researchers. But by helping scientists make better use of technologies like MSI, Fedorov hopes the work can contribute to discoveries that ultimately improve how diseases are understood, detected, and treated.
Like any recipe, the framework leaves room for adjustment. The team deliberately simplified some of the complex physics behind MSI to make the framework practical for other researchers, which means it is designed to point them toward promising conditions rather than predict exactly what will happen in every experiment.
“The theory provides a recipe that researchers can adapt by adding their own flavors,” Sentmanat said. “Rather than prescribing an exact solution, it offers a framework for identifying the right ingredients and refining the conditions to achieve the best results.”
Researchers can adapt that starting point to their own instruments, samples, and questions. What began as an effort to improve BeamMap could ultimately help others refine existing MSI technologies or develop new approaches of their own.
“It’s kind of empowering.”
Researchers can use a small sample of human tissue to search for molecular clues associated with cancer, investigate the chemical landscape of the brain, or determine where a drug travels after it enters the body. Mass spectrometry imaging, or MSI, helps answer those questions by mapping where different molecules are located within tissue. But there's a catch. Despite MSI's sophisticated capabilities, finding the right conditions to get useful results can still require a considerable amount of trial and error. Georgia Tech professor Andrei Fedorov and Ph.D. student John Sentmanat are working to change that.
]]>Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience
]]>Hosted at the Georgia Tech Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design, the workshop was organized by a committee of researchers and practitioners from across the macro-energy systems community. The committee was chaired by Micah Ziegler, assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy.
The two-day workshop brought together more than 130 participants and featured lightning talks, poster presentations, interactive learning sessions, and keynote addresses that strengthened connections across the macro-energy systems research community.
“The energy challenges facing society today are increasingly interconnected, and solving them requires a systems-level perspective,” said Christine Conwell, director of planning and operations at the Georgia Tech Strategic Energy Institute. “Supporting events like the MES Workshop, which provides a unique space for academic collaboration and knowledge sharing, aligns with the Strategic Energy Institute’s commitment to advancing research and workforce development that support more resilient and effective energy solutions.”
The workshop received financial support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which supports research and education in science, technology, engineering, math, and economics. Through its Energy and Environment program, the foundation helps advance interdisciplinary research and collaboration across the macro-energy systems field.
“The Macro-Energy Systems Workshop has become a significant forum for interdisciplinary energy systems researchers to share and discuss their work,” said Evan Michelson, director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Energy and Environment program. “We were especially glad to help ensure participation from early-career researchers spanning a wide range of institutions, providing them access to the collaborations and conversations that will help them develop as scientists.”
Graduate students and postdoctoral scholars played a central role in this year's workshop, presenting research on energy system planning, grid reliability, technology deployment, energy transitions, and policy. Their sessions gave the early-career researchers opportunities to share new approaches to studying large-scale energy systems, interact with faculty and industry experts, refine research ideas, and build collaborations beyond their home institutions.
“This year, we significantly expanded the MES Workshop to include more early-career scholars,” said Ziegler. “The workshop provides a great opportunity for young researchers to develop ideas, connections, and a better understanding of how to design research to have a positive impact on the world.”
The workshop also featured keynote presentations from Kelly Sanders, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Southern California, and Erin Mayfield, assistant professor at Dartmouth College's Thayer School of Engineering. Both speakers discussed insights from their experience contributing to policymaking and highlighted opportunities for energy systems research to inform policy decisions.
Interactive sessions led by Michelle Graff, assistant professor in the Georgia Tech Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy encouraged participants to consider how macro-energy systems research can more effectively inform and support policymakers and other decision-makers. Graff developed and facilitated the sessions, with support from Morgan Edwards, assistant professor of public affairs from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Micah Ziegler. The first session explored how researchers can identify policy windows and position their work to inform decision-making at the right time. The second focused on matching research to the appropriate audiences and jurisdictions, highlighting opportunities to inform policy at the state and local levels.
]]>Hosted at the Georgia Tech Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design, the workshop was organized by a committee of researchers and practitioners from across the macro-energy systems community. The committee was chaired by Micah Ziegler, assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy.
The two-day workshop brought together more than 130 participants and featured lightning talks, poster presentations, interactive learning sessions, and keynote addresses that strengthened connections across the macro-energy systems research community.
]]>They cite climate models estimating that limiting global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius could require removing approximately 10 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere annually by 2050, increasing to 20 billion tons per year by 2100. Current DAC systems remove only thousands of tons of CO₂ annually.
One challenge is improving the solid sorbents that capture CO₂ from ambient air. In collaboration with CarbonCapture Inc., researchers in ChBE have shown that a simple, one-step modification can upgrade a commercial amine resin into a more efficient and durable sorbent for CO₂ capture. They published their findings in Science Advances.
“Achieving economically viable DAC demands major improvements in solid sorbent design and performance,” said study author Professor Christopher W. Jones of ChBE, who noted that the benefits of DAC include its potential scalability, modest land-use requirements, flexibility in plant locations, and access to extensive geological reservoirs for long-term CO₂ storage.
Improving a Commercial Sorbent
Jones and his collaborators found a way to improve the performance of Lewatit VP OC 1065, a commercially available resin already considered a benchmark in the DAC field. The material works for DAC because it’s studded with amine groups, which are chemical sites that grab CO₂ molecules as air passes through the resin.
Rather than design a new sorbent, the researchers built on previous Georgia Tech studies with PPI (poly(propyleneimine)), a polymer that has shown advantages in both CO₂ capture and durability. They developed a simple grafting process that grows PPI directly from amine sites already present on the commercial resin, increasing its ability to capture CO₂.
The process involved soaking the resin in a small, inexpensive molecule called azetidine along with a small amount of acid, and then heating the mixture for two days.
The researchers found the upgraded resin captured about 75 percent more CO₂ than the untreated version under dry conditions that mimic open air, where CO₂ makes up only about 400 parts per million of the surrounding gas.
The material also performed well under simulated industrial flue-gas conditions, where CO₂ is far more concentrated, capturing more than 50 percent more than the untreated resin.
The team also tested the resin across temperatures ranging from 25 degrees Celsius down to -20 degrees Celsius and across a wide range of humidity levels. In humid air, the modified resin outperformed the original at every temperature tested, though its advantage disappeared in very cold, dry conditions.
Enhancing Durability
Sorbents used in DAC need to survive repeated use, cycling between capturing CO₂ and being heated to release it. Amine-based materials are known to degrade over time when exposed to oxygen. But the branched bPPI chains added by the researchers to the sorbent reduced oxidative degradation by about half.
In tests that simulated 150 rounds of capture and release from industrial exhaust, the modified resin held up significantly better than the original material, the researchers found.
“These commercial resins are already leading candidates for large-scale carbon capture deployment,” said Arkaprabha Giri, a former postdoctoral researcher in Jones’ lab who is the study’s lead author. “If we can meaningfully boost their performance with a process this simple, that’s a real opportunity to speed up deployment without waiting on an entirely new generation of materials.”
Study co-author Omid Ghaffari Nik, Ph.D., vice president of materials science and process at CarbonCapture Inc., said that bringing down the steep cost of DAC is a crucial goal.
“The U.S. Department of Energy has set a target of atmospheric CO₂ capture and storage at less than $100 per net metric ton, emphasizing the need for innovation in sorbent-based DAC systems,” Nik said.
The use of an existing commercial resin and readily available chemicals could offer advantages in eventually scaling up the process, the researchers said. They successfully applied the same method to a second commercial resin, Purolite A110, suggesting the approach isn't limited to one product.
The team has filed a provisional patent and is now working to extend the technique to other amine-based materials, with the aim of scaling the process from lab quantities to the industrial scale.
CITATION: Arkaprabha Giri, UnJin Ryu, Jiaqi Zhang, Opeyemi Ojelade, Wenyang Zhao, Jacob Hoffman, Mark Robertson, Jordi Espín, Madison Nichols, Surya Parker, Omid Ghaffari Nik, and Christopher W. Jones, "In situ azetidine polymerization elevates the performance of commercial polymer resin sorbents in carbon dioxide capture," Science Advances, 2026
]]>Despite decades of research, the chaotic nature of turbulence makes it difficult to predict and control. This challenge impedes more than smoother air travel. Solving the turbulence problem could lead to advances in areas ranging from sustainable energy to training a smarter workforce for the era of artificial intelligence (AI).
To advance understanding of turbulence, the National Science Foundation is establishing a new, $30 million Science and Technology Center (STC) at Michigan State University. Georgia Tech is among eight universities supporting the center.
Assistant Professor Qi Tang will join the STC for Transformative Explorations in Multi-Physics and Engineering of Scientific Turbulence (TEMPEST). TEMPEST, launching on Sept. 1, aims to build trustworthy, predictive models of real-world turbulence.
Tang will lead TEMPEST’s modeling and scientific machine learning (ML) efforts. NSF will fund Tang and Georgia Tech with over $1 million from the center’s five-year, $30 million award.
By understanding and predicting turbulence, TEMPEST can unlock new applications, with a focus on fusion energy and national security. The center will also generate long-term research projects with applications in air and space flight, manufacturing, chemistry, and broaden science education and AI fluency.
“Turbulence has resisted prediction for a century,” said Tang, a faculty member in the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE).
“STC TEMPEST aims to develop a unified, predictive science that advances fusion energy, improves hypersonic technologies, and deepens our understanding of how stars created the elements that make up our world and ourselves. For everyday people, the center points toward abundant clean energy and faster, more efficient flight."
Turbulence is the motion of a fluid characterized by chaotic changes in pressure and speed. Turbulent flows can occur across all scales, from interactions between subatomic particles to astrophysical scales, including supernovas, black holes, and cosmic rays.
While turbulent flows are common and occur naturally, scientists still do not fully understand them. Small changes in a turbulent flow can produce dramatically different outcomes. Combined with the countless interactions across multiple scales of time and space, this makes turbulence extraordinarily difficult to predict.
“Rather than studying individual pieces of this enormously complex problem in isolation, we are bringing together theory, experimentation, computation and artificial intelligence to develop a deeper understanding of turbulence across scales,” said Michael Murillo, an MSU professor and the director of TEMPEST.
“Our goal is not simply to understand turbulence better, but to make it predictable and controllable in ways that will enable new technologies and scientific discoveries.”
The NSF TEMPEST award supports students and researchers at Michigan State University, Auburn University, Baylor University, Georgia Tech, San José State University, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, University of Rochester, and Yale University to combine theory, computation, AI techniques, and experimentation to build trustworthy predictive models of real-world turbulence for high-consequence applications.
Additional partners include Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Pacific Fusion, and General Atomics.
Together, TEMPEST researchers will build more accurate and reliable physics-grounded models. The center will test new ideas against real-world observations, then use those results to refine the models.
Tang contributes expertise in ML, scientific computing, and plasma physics to STC TEMPEST.
Earlier this year, Tang received an Early Career Research award from the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. He is using the award to build ML and data science tools that help scientists analyze massive datasets from fusion experiments and simulations.
This interdisciplinary approach is intended to move science from understanding why turbulence behaves as it does to predicting how it will behave. Through prediction and simulation, scientists could eventually engineer solutions to control turbulence in real-world scenarios.
The center will make its data and software broadly available and engage the public through museum exhibitions, immersive media, and educational programs that are expected to reach more than 10,000 K-12 students annually. TEMPEST will also help train an AI-fluent scientific workforce prepared to tackle complex problems across disciplines.
“One reason I am excited to work in TEMPEST is because it aligns perfectly with our School of CSE mission. As a discipline, CSE complements theory and experimentation as a mode of scientific discovery,” Tang said.
“We build computational models to simulate scientific and engineering concepts, like turbulence in this case, so that we can test theories that are too difficult, expensive, or risky for physical experiments.”
]]>This press release is shared jointly with the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) newsroom. Georgia Tech faculty Martha Grover and Maggie Kosal also serve as SRNL Joint Appointees.
The Georgia Institute of Technology and the Savannah River National Laboratory announced the joint appointment of Facundo M. Fernández to collaborate in research around mass spectrometry, an analytical technique used to measure the mass-to-charge ratio of ions for research.
“Our partnership with Facundo will deepen SRNL’s innovative research in mass spectrometry and its groundbreaking applications,” said Tammy Taylor, SRNL’s deputy director of Science and Technology. “His expertise and collaboration will undoubtedly accelerate our lab’s drive for scientific excellence and impactful discoveries.”
Fernández is renowned internationally for his work in bioanalytical chemistry. His research focuses on developing tools to analyze small-volume samples, tissues and single cells, with applications in understanding diseases such as cancer, cystic fibrosis and inflammatory bowel disease. He has published 234 peer-reviewed papers, given over 230 invited lectures, and supervised 35 doctoral and master’s degree students.
He also directs the Systems Mass Spectrometry Core (SyMS-C) at Georgia Tech’s Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, managing more than 15 mass spectrometers.
“Being appointed as a joint faculty member with SRNL opens many new opportunities for collaborative research at the intersection of biology, chemistry and engineering,” said Fernández. “This type of collaborative research is what Georgia Tech is renowned for. We aim to address societal questions with global impact. I have been incredibly impressed with the quality of science at SRNL, and I look forward to many joint discoveries in the future.”
Fernández is a Regents’ Professor and the Vasser-Woolley Chair in Bioanalytical Chemistry at Georgia Tech’s School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees (Licenciatura) in chemistry from the Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, in 1995, and his doctorate in analytical chemistry from the same university in 1999. From 2000 to 2001, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University’s Department of Chemistry. He served as a senior postdoctoral researcher and later as a research scientist between 2002 and 2003 with a research group at the University of Arizona.
“Professor Fernández is a renowned expert in the field of mass spectrometry, and it has been a privilege to already have him as a collaborator involved in our Laboratory Directed Research and Development program,” said SRNL’s Christopher Orton, division director for Nuclear Nonproliferation. “This joint appointment will strengthen the relationship between SRNL and Georgia Tech as we continue to work together to improve our understanding of the environmental fate of chemical contaminants in complex matrices.”
SRNL’s Joint Appointment Program provides university faculty opportunities to engage in research and development addressing the nation’s energy related challenges. SRNL staff and joint appointees help ensure America’s security and prosperity through transformative science and technology solutions, and joint appointees serve as a bridge between their university and SRNL researchers to deliver the future workforce for the Department of Energy.
Savannah River National Laboratory is a multi-program federally funded research and development center managed and operated by Battelle Savannah River Alliance for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management. EM transforms the nation’s environmental liabilities into opportunities for innovation, job creation, and economic growth, while ensuring safe, secure and prosperous communities across America. For more information, visit energy.gov/em.
Six years after demonstrating that membranes could separate crude oil at the molecular level, Georgia Tech researcher Ryan Lively is part of an international team that has taken the concept a significant step further.
The team, including investigators at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), discovered that a membrane material widely believed to be non-selective for molecules as small as those found in crude can in fact selectively separate crude oil into lighter and heavier fractions in a way researchers did not expect.
Published in Nature, their findings suggest that using membranes to separate crude oil before distillation could significantly reduce the energy, water, and carbon footprint of petroleum refining.
Lively, the Thomas C. DeLoach Jr. Endowed Professor in Georgia Tech's School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, served as an advisor and corresponding author on the study. Dong-Yeun Koh, an associate professor at KAIST and a former postdoc in the Lively Lab at Georgia Tech, led the study.
Building on Earlier Research
In the 2020 Science paper, Lively and collaborators demonstrated that specially designed membranes could separate crude oil into valuable fractions without relying solely on traditional heat-driven distillation. The work helped establish membrane-based crude oil fractionation as a promising alternative for reducing energy use in refining.
"This work grew directly out of the challenges we identified in our original findings in the 2020 article," Lively said. "One of the key challenges that the KAIST team set out to tackle was the very low oil productivities of the membrane units, which has limited the ability of this concept to leave the lab. Along the way, we not only increased the productivities, but we also uncovered a surprising new mechanism that could make membrane-based crude oil separations even more practical.”
The new study built on that foundation. The researchers investigated polyacrylonitrile (PAN) membranes, a material commonly used as a non-selective support layer in filtration systems. Because the material is porous, the team generally did not expect it to perform precise molecular separations on its own.
But what they found surprised them, Lively said. As crude oil flowed through the membrane, heavier hydrocarbon molecules accumulated within the membrane's pores. Instead of clogging the membrane, the buildup created a stable internal layer that gradually narrowed the pathways through which molecules could travel. Surprisingly, the molecules that caused the buildup in the first place were eventually excluded from entering the membrane, resulting in a steady production of higher quality oil through the narrow pathways that remained.
In effect, the membrane created its own molecular-scale filter. The result was a process that allowed lighter hydrocarbons to pass through while holding back heavier components.
The membrane enriched lighter fractions such as naphtha and kerosene while achieving crude oil flow rates more than 23 times higher those reported in the 2020 paper for whole crude oils
When Buildup Becomes an Asset
In most filtration systems, buildup inside a membrane (or fouling) is considered a problem because it reduces performance.
But according to the researchers, this study demonstrates that something different can happen under the right conditions.
Using a range of analytical techniques, the researchers found that long-chain hydrocarbon molecules accumulated inside the membrane and became an essential part of the separation process. The deposits effectively transformed larger pores into stable transport pathways measuring less than two nanometers across, they deduced based on available experimental evidence.
The membrane maintained consistent separation performance during four weeks of continuous operation, suggesting the filtration pathways remained stable over time.
“The findings challenge traditional assumptions about membrane fouling and may offer new opportunities for designing industrial separation systems that take advantage of similar behavior,” Lively said.
Potential Impact on Refining
Today's refineries heat entire streams of crude oil to separate them into useful products. By using membranes to remove a substantial portion of the lighter hydrocarbons before distillation, refineries could reduce the amount of material that must undergo energy-intensive heating. Alternatively, the refinery can use the membranes to incrementally increase refinery capacity, which is currently not possible using large-scale distillation equipment.
To evaluate the potential impacts of the membrane system, the researchers modeled a refinery process that incorporated a membrane separation step before conventional distillation.
“This study reveals a new scientific principle in which a membrane interacts with a complex mixture and spontaneously forms its own separation channels," Koh said. "Working with real crude oil supplied by HD Hyundai Oilbank allowed us to validate the technology under conditions relevant to industrial operation.”
The team's technoeconomic analysis showed that incorporating the membrane process could reduce distillation energy use by 30%, carbon dioxide emissions by 35%, and water consumption by 20%.
Applied across U.S. atmospheric crude distillation capacity — about 18 million barrels per day — those savings would be equivalent to powering roughly 2.2 million homes, removing about 3 million passenger vehicles from the road, and supplying enough water for approximately 660,000 people each year.
"Turning crude oil into useful products has relied on essentially the same basic approach for more than a century," Lively said. "Membranes offer a path toward achieving those separations with dramatically lower energy requirements and emissions."
The study's findings also suggest that the phenomenon may not be limited to a single membrane chemistry. Researchers observed similar behavior in a second membrane material, raising the possibility that the approach could be extended to other membrane systems.
"This is a terrific piece of research that rewards curiosity," said Andrew LIvington, vice president of research and innovation and professor at Queen Mary University of London, who was not involved with the study. "This work adds significantly to the field of membrane separations of crude oil streams as it tackles the first, hard to achieve separation of heavy hydrocarbons – most work to date has focused on lighter oils – and it uses a simple and readily available membrane."
CITATION:
Jihoon Choi, Hyeokjun Seo, Minyong Lee, Woong-Chul Shin, Jaemin Choi, Keonwoo Choi, Min-Jun Jang, Sung Gap Im, Jae W. Lee, Ryan P. Lively, and Dong-Yeun Koh, "Crude oil fractionation by means of mesoporous polyacrylonitrile membranes," Nature, 2026.
“I used to see ash settling on our terrace from time to time and thought it was just waste,” Tripathi said.
Years later, at Georgia Tech, Tripathi started looking at that ash differently. What once appeared to be ordinary industrial waste became the focal point for her work.
As a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Tripathi, along with Ching-Hua Huang, Turnipseed Family Chair and Professor, and Xing Xie, Carlton S. Wilder Assistant Professor, both in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, developed a method to recover rare earth elements from coal fly ash.
Rare earth elements (REEs) help power electric vehicle motors, wind turbines, MRI machines, smartphones, and defense systems because of their unusually strong magnetic and electrical properties. Despite the name, most REEs are not actually rare in quantity. They’re rare in concentration. REEs are scattered through the Earth’s crust in amounts too small to mine easily, and much of their global supply chain remains concentrated outside of the United States.
That imbalance has turned REEs into both an economic and national security concern. Countries are competing for the materials sustaining advanced manufacturing, energy systems, and military technologies, increasing pressure to find domestic sources. That urgency has pushed researchers like Tripathi, Huang, and Xie to look at coal fly ash differently: not just as industrial waste but as a potential source of materials that modern technology depends on.
Coal naturally contains trace amounts of rare earth elements. Burning the coal concentrates those elements in the ash left behind.
Tripathi developed a method for extracting rare earth elements that avoids the corrosive chemicals used in conventional extraction. The same ash that once coated her rooftop could now become a secondary domestic source of critical materials.
Coal fly ash already exists in enormous quantities across the United States. About 2 billion tons are stored in impoundments, such as storage ponds and landfills, according to the Department of Energy.
Those sites require long-term monitoring because coal fly ash can release contaminants into soil and groundwater. Major storms can also damage storage sites and spread the material into surrounding communities and waterways.
Inside that ash, REEs are dispersed in tiny concentrations. Recovering them is a challenge; recovering them cleanly is an even greater one. Many existing recovery methods rely on concentrated acids, large amounts of water, or extreme heat during extraction. Some techniques require temperatures high enough to rival industrial furnaces. Others create additional waste streams.
Tripathi and her team wanted a different approach.
They built the system around a recyclable ionic liquid, a salt-based substance stable enough to operate under conditions that would break down water-based systems. The liquid pulls rare earth elements away from the ash. An applied electrical current then causes the recovered elements to collect onto a surface where they can be removed. Afterward, the liquid can be cleaned and reused.
“The beauty of this system is that it works beyond the limits of water,” Tripathi said.
“The ionic liquid allows us to recover rare earth elements under conditions that water-based systems just can’t handle.”
The process also changes depending on the voltage applied. At lower voltages, the system selectively recovers neodymium, an REE used in high-strength permanent magnets found in electric vehicles, wind turbines, and defense systems. At higher voltages, it recovers a broader mixture. The system recovered nearly half of the available neodymium during testing.
Tripathi has shown that the chemistry works in small batches. The next challenge is scale: whether the system can recover enough rare earth elements efficiently enough to make the process commercially practical.
The same approach could extend beyond coal fly ash. Batteries, discarded electronics, and medical waste all contain valuable metals that often end up buried in landfills or destroyed during disposal.
For Tripathi, the idea began at home, where fly ash would settle on her terrace. What once seemed like an ordinary nuisance could help reshape how critical materials are recovered from waste.
Tripathi’s research is published in Environmental Science and Technology.
It was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy.
“Her outstanding research accomplishments and contributions to the School and Georgia Tech led to this selection,” said Professor Christopher W. Jones, the John F. Brock III School Chair in ChBE@GT.
The $20,000 in discretionary funding from this one-year fellowship will support Jamali’s research activities focused on developing new tools for in situ liquid-phase transmission electron microscopy, stochastic thermodynamics, and nanoscience-based platforms.
The Spencers established the endowment from which the term fellowship funding comes in 2017. This endowment will eventually lead to the establishment of a professorship in ChBE@GT.
“Bob Spencer is a successful alumnus who has remained connected to our chemical engineering program,” according to Jones. “His family’s gift will allow ChBE@GT to support an early career professor at a critical stage of their development—the crucial years just before their promotion and tenure review. We are grateful for their support and generosity.”
Read Full Story on the ChBE Newspage
]]>“Her outstanding research accomplishments and contributions to the School and Georgia Tech led to this selection,” said Professor Christopher W. Jones, the John F. Brock III School Chair in ChBE@GT.
The $20,000 in discretionary funding from this one-year fellowship will support Jamali’s research activities focused on developing new tools for in situ liquid-phase transmission electron microscopy, stochastic thermodynamics, and nanoscience-based platforms.
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