At-cost grocery pilot opens in Walker Memorial

When the Food Insecurity Solutions Working Group (FISWG) submitted their report in the spring of 2017 to Vice President and Dean for Student Life Suzy Nelson, one of its recommendation stood out: Open a low-cost grocery store on the MIT campus.

In order to learn more about best practices and to inform MIT’s approach, working group members visited colleges and universities with food banks or low-cost stores that make staple foods available to students. Earlier this month, MIT’s own store — an at-cost grocery for students named TechMart — opened on the second floor of Walker Memorial, sharing space with Rebecca’s Café. In an agreement with the Division of Student Life (DSL), Rebecca’s will operate the store.

“We are very excited to take another significant step in making MIT a food-secure campus,” says Nelson, who with members of the FISWG and staff from DSL helped to spearhead the creation of TechMart. “We have seen the success of similar programs at other schools, and I think TechMart will help to answer students’ requests for convenient, on-campus access to affordable groceries.”

Mark Hayes, director of campus dining, worked closely with students and David Randall, senior associate dean for student support and wellbeing, to get the store up and running this fall.

“I’m grateful to everyone involved for their creativity and focus,” Hayes says. “The students on the FISWG have been great partners, as has the team from Rebecca’s Café who stepped up to take on a unique responsibility in a thoughtful way. Together, we accomplished a lot in a short period of time.”

Randall, who helped to lead the FISWG, has seen TechMart go from idea to reality in less than a year.

“The working group convened last fall, and among the first things they did was look at other colleges and universities to see how they addressed campus food insecurity,” he says. “Other schools showed us that an affordable grocery store was an important part of their overall approach. The working group members made this a key recommendation, and DSL really got behind it. Now here we are, opening just six months after we finalized the report. It’s really exciting.”

TechMart is open to all MIT students and carries wide variety of foods, from fresh produce and proteins (meat and tofu) to spices and sauces, all sold at cost. For students who don’t have time to shop, Rebecca’s will continue to offer grab-and-go chef’s boxes packed with ingredients for two servings of a healthy entrée.

“I think it’s really cool. It’s very close; closer than where I usually go to shop, and it seems like the prices are pretty good,” says sophomore Bianca Wang-Polendo, who was among the shoppers when TechMart opened on Sept. 17. “A zucchini is 81 cents and other goods are fairly priced, much better I think than other places.”

While the TechMart pilot is an important step in fulfilling the FISWG recommendations, other proposed solutions are either already underway — including SwipeShare and cooking and budgeting classes — or under consideration.

“We are looking to implement as many of the FISWG’s recommendations as is feasible,” Randall says.

The TechMart store's hours are 3 p.m. to 11 p.m., Monday through Friday. Students need their MIT ID to purchase groceries, and the store accepts credit and debit cards, cash, TechCash, and dining dollars. Shoppers can share feedback about the store and product selection by leaving a comment card in the store or emailing foodstuff@mit.edu.

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Software finds the best way to stick a Mars landing

Selecting a landing site for a rover headed to Mars is a lengthy process that normally involves large committees of scientists and engineers. These committees typically spend several years weighing a mission’s science objectives against a vehicle’s engineering constraints, to identify sites that are both scientifically interesting and safe to land on.

For instance, a mission’s science team may want to explore certain geological sites for signs of water, life, and habitability. But engineers may find that those sites are too steep for a vehicle to land safely, or the locations may not receive enough sunlight to power the vehicle’s solar panels once it has landed. Finding a suitable landing site therefore involves piecing together information collected over the years by past Mars missions. These data, though growing with each mission, are patchy and incomplete.

Now researchers at MIT have developed a software tool for computer-aided discovery that could help mission planners make these decisions. It automatically produces maps of favorable landing sites, using the available data on Mars’ geology and terrain, as well as a list of scientific priorities and engineering constraints that a user can specify.

As an example, a user can stipulate that a rover should land in a site where it can explore certain geological targets, such as open-basin lakes. At the same time, the landing site should not exceed a certain slope, otherwise the vehicle would topple over while attempting to land. The program then generates a “favorability map” of landing sites that meet both constraints. These locations can shift and change as a user adds additional specifications.

The program can also lay out possible paths that a rover can take from a given landing site to certain geological features. For instance, if a user specifies that a rover should explore sedimentary rock exposures, the program produces paths to any such nearby structures and calculates the time that it would take to reach them.

Victor Pankratius, principal research scientist in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, says mission planners can use the program to quickly and efficiently consider different landing and exploratory scenarios.

“This is never going to replace the actual committee, but it can make things much more efficient, because you can play with different scenarios while you’re talking,” Pankratius says.

The team’s study was published online on Aug. 31 by Earth and Space Science and is part of the journal’s Sept. 8 online issue.

New sites

Pankratius and postdoc Guillaume Rongier, in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, created the program to identify favorable landing sites for a conceptual mission similar to NASA’s Mars 2020 rover, which is engineered to land in horizontal, even, dust-free areas and aims to explore an ancient, potentially habitable, site with magmatic outcrops.

They found the program identified many landing sites for the rover that have been considered in the past, and it highlighted other promising landing sites that were rarely proposed. “We see there are sites we could explore with existing rover technologies, that landing site committees may want to reconsider,” Pankratius says.

The program could also be used to explore engineering requirements for future generations of Mars rovers. “Assuming you can land on steeper curves, or drive faster, then we can derive which new regions you can explore,” Pankratius says.

A fuzzy landing

The software relies partly on “fuzzy logic,” a mathematical logic scheme that groups things not in a binary fashion like Boolean logic, such as yes/no, true/false, or safe/unsafe, but in a more fluid, probability-based fashion.

“Traditionally this idea comes from mathematics, where instead of saying an element belongs to a set, yes or no, fuzzy logic says it belongs with a certain probability,” thus reflecting incomplete or imprecise information, Pankratius explains.

In the context of finding a suitable landing site, the program calculates the probability that a rover can climb a certain slope, with the probability decreasing as the a location becomes more steep.

“With fuzzy logic we can expresses this probability spatially — how bad is it if I’m this steep, versus this steep,” Pankratius says. “It’s is a way to deal with imprecision, in a way.”

Using algorithms related to fuzzy logic, the team creates raw, or initial, favorability maps of possible landing sites over the entire planet. These maps are gridded into individual cells, each representing about 3 square kilometers on the surface of Mars. The program calculates, for each cell, the probability that it is a favorable landing site, and generates a map that is color-graded to represent probabilities between 0 and 1. Darker cells represent sites with a near-zero probability of being a favorable landing site, while lighter locations have a higher chance of a safe landing with interesting scientific prospects.

Once they generate a raw map of possible landing sites, the researchers take into account various uncertainties in the landing location, such as changes in trajectory and potential navigation errors during descent. Considering these uncertainties, the program then generates landing ellipses, or circular targets where a rover is likely to land to maximize safety and scientific exploration.

The program also uses an algorithm known as fast marching to chart out paths that a rover can take over a given terrain once it’s landed. Fast marching is typically used to calculate the propagation of a front, such as how fast a front of wind reaches a shore if traveling at a given speed. For the first time, Pankratius and Rongier applied fast marching to compute a rover’s travel time as it travels from a starting point to a geological structure of interest.

“If you are somewhere on Mars and you get this processed map, you can ask, ‘From here, how fast can I go to any point in my surroundings? And this algorithm will tell you,” Pankratius says.

The algorithm can also map out routes to avoid certain obstacles that may slow down a rover’s trip, and chart out probabilities of hitting certain types of geological structures in a landing area.

“It’s more difficult for a rover to drive through dust, so it’ll go at a slower pace, and dust isn’t necessarily everywhere, just in patches,” Rongier says. “The algorithm will consider such obstacles when mapping out the fastest traverse paths.”

The teams says operators of current rovers on the Martian surface can use the software program to direct the vehicles more efficiently to sites of scientific interest. In the future, Pankratius envisions this technique or something similar to be integrated into increasingly autonomous rovers that don’t require humans to operate the vehicles all the time from Earth.

“One day, if we have fully autonomous rovers, they can factor in all these things to know where they can go, and be able to adapt to unforeseen situations,” Pankratius says. “You want autonomy, otherwise it can take a long time to communicate back and forth when you have to make critical decisions quickly.”

The team is also looking into applications of the techniques in geothermal site exploration on Earth in collaboration with the MIT Earth Resources Lab in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.

“It’s a very similar problem,” Pankratius says. “Instead of saying ‘Is this a good site, yes or no?’ you can say, ‘Show me a map of all the areas that would likely be viable for geothermal exploration.’”

As data improve, both for Mars and for geothermal structures on Earth, he says that that data can be fed into the existing program to provide more accurate analyses.

“The program is incrementally enhanceable,” he says.

This research was funded, in part, by NASA and the National Science Foundation.

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John M. Deutch endows new MIT Institute Professorship

Institute Professor Emeritus John M. Deutch ’61, PhD ’65 has made a generous endowment gift to name an MIT Institute Professorship. This appointment — the highest honor awarded by MIT’s faculty and administration — recognizes faculty members who have “demonstrated exceptional distinction by a combination of leadership, accomplishment, and service in the scholarly, educational, and general intellectual life of the Institute or wider academic community.”  Currently, MIT has 10 active and 12 emeritus Institute Professors.

Deutch says his motivation for making the gift was his “great respect for MIT and for the tremendous professional and personal satisfaction I have enjoyed as a member of the MIT community for over 59 years.”

Deutch has earned distinction across a career spanning academia and government — including service on the chemistry faculties at Princeton University and MIT, in the MIT administration, and in the administrations of four U.S. presidents.

“It’s rare for anyone to possess the intellectual intensity, managerial rigor, and strategic vision to excel in scholarship, in academic leadership, and in national service; John Deutch is that rare individual,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “Institute Professors are the keepers of the flame at MIT — those faculty members who in the eyes of their colleagues embody MIT’s highest ideals of scholarly achievement and service to the Institute and society. I find it wonderfully fitting that John has chosen to endow an Institute Professorship — an inspired act of creative citizenship.”

Deutch’s relationship with MIT began when he entered the three-two program in 1959. He holds a BA from Amherst College in history and economics and a BS in chemical engineering from MIT, awarded in 1961, as well as a PhD in physical chemistry from MIT, awarded in 1965. In 1966, after a year as a postdoc at the National Bureau of Standards, he joined the chemistry faculty at Princeton.

In 1970, Deutch returned to MIT to join the chemistry faculty, eventually serving as chair of the department from 1976 to 1977, dean of the School of Science from 1982 to 1985, and provost from 1985 to 1990. He was appointed an MIT Institute Professor in 1990, and in 2009 he received MIT’s Gordon Y Billard award “for special service of outstanding merit performed for the Institute.”

His career includes extensive government service: Director of Energy Research and Undersecretary of Energy in the Carter administration, a member of George H.W. Bush’s President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, as well as Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisitions and Technology, Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Director of Central Intelligence in the first Clinton administration.

He has served on many presidential and congressional commissions and advisory committees for government agencies and received numerous public service awards.

Deutch has been a board member and advisor to numerous corporations and a director or trustee of nonprofit organizations, including the Center for American Progress; the Council on Foreign Relations; Resources for the Future; Massachusetts General Hospital’s Physicians Organization; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology; the Urban Institute; and Wellesley College.

Deutch was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2007, and he delivered the 2010 Harvard University Godkin Lectures on the Essentials of Free Government and the Duties of the Citizen.

Deutch has more than 150 scientific publications, as well as numerous articles on technology, energy, international security, and public policy issues. He has supervised graduate students interested in chemistry, national security, and global energy issues. In recent years Deutch has participated in MIT interdisciplinary energy studies including the Future of Nuclear Energy, the Future of Coal (with a focus on carbon dioxide capture and sequestration), the Future of Natural Gas, and the Future of Solar Energy.

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Janelle Heslop awarded Switzer Fellowship

The Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation has chosen MIT graduate student Janelle Heslop as a Switzer Fellow. Heslop is one of 20 students to receive the fellowship for 2018. Heslop is currently pursuing both an MBA and a master's in civil and environmental engineering through the Leaders for Global Operations program.

The Switzer Foundation Fellowship is awarded to talented graduate students from New England and California who are pursuing career paths that will result in positive change for the environment and who have displayed leadership in their field.

“The Switzer Foundation is known to be a vibrant community for environmental leaders, and I am honored to have an association like Switzer say ‘this person is a leader in our field’,” Heslop says.

Prior to MIT, Heslop worked for seven years at the intersection of business and sustainability. As a consultant at GreenOrder, she advised companies on their environmental innovation strategies; she later oversaw operations and performance improvement for water utilities at Veolia, a global environmental services company.

“My goal is to apply my environmental passion and expertise to the corporate world, thinking about how we can bring sustainability as a lever for innovation to companies, and create products that reduce environmental impact; to do good business while decreasing environmental impact,” she says.

The Switzer Fellowship Network is comprised of over 600 fellows who are actively working to create a sustainable future in the areas of natural and social sciences, law, business, and policy. The network of fellows work together to provide expertise, support, and encouragement to each other.

Although Heslop has experience working in business through the environmental perspective, she is still exploring the future direction of her career and is hoping to gain more insight through her fellowship.

“The Switzer Foundation has been wonderful,” she says. “They have already identified six or seven potential mentors for me who have been in the field for a while. They are very proactive about helping you make connections, allowing you to think about what’s next in your career.”

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Derek Straub: Shaping the future of additive manufacturing

Scattered about Derek Straub's office — its walls only slightly muffling the screech of the surrounding machine shop — are intriguing artifacts: webbed metallic structures, twisted cylinders made of polymer, aluminum blocks whose cross sections reveal intricate architecture inside. They were built, layer by layer, in the MIT Lincoln Laboratory's additive manufacturing (AM) machines. They were also born of Straub's vision.

Straub is the AM lead at Lincoln Laboratory. He's now being internationally recognized for his contributions to the additive manufacturing field. The magazine Manufacturing Engineering, a publication of SME (formally the Society of Manufacturing Engineers), has named Straub among the 30 individuals under the age of 30 who are leading the manufacturing industry into the future.

"I feel honored, especially to be recognized alongside so many talented and varied people, CEOs, academic researchers, entrepreneurs," says Straub, who works in the Fabrication Engineering Group. "I think one thing that sets me apart is my exploratory mindset. I take calculated, engineering-based risks to push the edge of what's possible in AM and then, at the laboratory, we quickly apply what we've learned straight into our real-world defense applications."

In his seven years at the laboratory, Straub has become the go-to expert for how to design, prototype, and build 3-D-printed parts that are used in systems as diverse as satellites, imaging systems, drones, and breath monitors. He earned a master's of engineering in manufacturing degree at MIT through the Lincoln Scholars Program in 2015.

In the shop where he works, Straub points out the array of conventional subtractive machines, which cut or laser away material to produce a final form. In contrast to subtractive processes, AM, as its name suggests, is additive, layering material to build the final form. Straub explained that AM is especially useful for making complex parts, ones that require intricate geometry, curves, or voids that would be difficult or impossible to carve by using subtractive tools.

"We can design complex parts that were previously unattainable, but are now actually achievable due to AM," he says. "It's here to stay, but it's not completely replacing subtractive machining; it's just another tool, a very important one."

Part of his role as AM lead is to open up engineers' minds to AM designs and the functions they can enable. Last year, 39 percent of hardware programs at the laboratory used AM in some aspect. Straub expects this figure to grow to close to 100 percent in five years.

One notable program was a high-energy laser system that was built with 115 additively manufactured parts, more than a quarter of the entire system's components. These parts helped keep the system lightweight and compact, two major program requirements, but also served functional purposes — for example, keeping the system cool and providing structural rigidity. The metal plates that house the system's fiber amplifier were built with flow channels inside, allowing cooling fluid to pass through tunnels following the curves of the hot laser fibers. This AM design would have otherwise been conventionally impossible to machine, Straub says.  

Jim Ingraham, Straub's former group leader, nominated him for the 30 Under 30 award.

"In my six years of working with Derek, I watched a highly creative and technically advanced engineer not only embrace and utilize additive manufacturing technologies but become a leader in the field, developing a variety of previously unattainable integrated multifunctional parts," Ingraham says.

While AM is more popularly known as "3-D printing" (a term coined by an MIT professor when machines first used inkjet heads to dispense adhesives to bind layers together), Straub prefers the term additive manufacturing because it is more encompassing of the various industrial techniques in use today.

One technique is called selective laser melting (SLM). Through the window on the SLM machine, Straub points out a 10-by-10-inch metal base plate and next to it a bin of aluminum powder. It's deceivingly heavy. "Try lifting a scoop of stainless steel," Straub says,

In the manufacturing process, a bar pushes a dusting of powder onto the plate, a laser above the plate melts the powder in specific spots, and the melted metal cools and solidifies. Over and over through this dusting, melting, and cooling dance, the part is produced. The SLM machine is one of nine industrial AM machines that Straub oversees daily.

In addition to supervising production, Straub is driving AM research at the laboratory. One area he's excited about is research in composites, like carbon fiber reinforced polymers. "Everyone agrees that composites are amazing, they're lighter, stronger, stiffer, and so on, but they're a nightmare to manufacture," he says.

Straub wants to develop advanced AM processes to build composite materials that could be tailored to serve a part's function, for example, by being stiff in one area of the part but flexible in another. Multifunctional parts are also another focus; he envisions, and is already producing, AM structures that have several functions, such as ones embedded with electronics, RF antennas, or heat exchangers.

Besides being functional, many of the parts Straub produces also happen to be beautiful.

"Many of us engineers think rectilinearly; when we think about support, we think of trusses. But when we give our topology optimization software the constraints, it comes out with this," he says, holding out a small metal object. It's an optical mount, but the mount's supports look like metallic tree branches, crisscrossing and curving organically. "Sometimes nature has the best way figured out already."

Nature plays a role in Straub's big picture vision for AM. Can we use what nature provides us to manufacture what we need on the spot? He thinks about NASA's mission to send humans to Mars. "We won't be able to send everything we need; we aren't sending steel," Straub says, "but could we use the actual sand, the soil, the minerals there to additively manufacture buildings and structures?" Similarly, he thinks about military convoys and the lives lost transporting materials to bases. "With AM, we can make thousands of parts with the same tool.  It opens up the space to building on demand, on location," Straub says.

While Straub is leading AM into the future, he's also sharing what he's learned with the next generation. At the MIT Beaver Works Summer Institute in August, Straub and his colleagues developed a new unit that taught kids to hack a 3-D printer to do something new with it. The boom of commercial 3-D printers has kids enthusiastic about and familiar with the technology. This enthusiasm will only help fuel what Straub sees as an inevitably growing industry.

"AM is a game changer," he says. "It is greatly impacting the world and it's enabling new programs at Lincoln Laboratory. The only thing holding us back currently is our minds."

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Honing quantum sensing

While quantum technologies have great long-term potential in computing applications, they are closer to practical use in sensing devices that will open new vistas in metrology, biology, neuroscience, and many other fields by enabling measurement of structures as small as individual photons, particles, and neurons.

New research from MIT’s interdisciplinary Quantum Engineering Group (QEG) is addressing one of the fundamental challenges facing these quantum sensor systems: removing environmental noise from the signal being measured.

The root of the problem, explains QEG doctoral student David Layden, is the extreme sensitivity of quantum sensors to their surrounding environment. These sensors typically start in a quantum superposition of two distinct states. Minuscule external forces induce a phase variation between the two states that can be leveraged to measure physical quantities like temperature, motion, and electric and magnetic fields with unprecedented resolution.

But this same sensitivity means that the sensors are also picking up many extraneous environmental inputs in addition to the signal of interest. Via a process called decoherence, this noise introduces uncertainty into the quantum sensors’ phase relationships and limits their ability to make precise measurements.

Several noise-reduction techniques have been developed to improve sensitivity by reducing decoherence. One common technique is dynamical decoupling — the introduction of a series of control pulses into the system, which allows the filtering of noise from signal based on frequency. This technique, however, is incompatible with DC signals, which are often what sensors are seeking to measure.

Research into quantum computing has also, over the past couple of decades, produced error-correction schemes like the use of redundant quantum bits. While these are useful in information-processing applications, they have significant limitations for sensors.

“The standard stuff from the computing world is a little overzealous here,” says Layden. “It’s very good at correcting errors and pushing down noise, but it also tends to correct away the signal because it can’t differentiate the two.”

More recently, error-corrected quantum sensing (ECQS) techniques have been developed, in which a recovery operation effectively removes noise that affects the sensor from a different direction than the signal — along the x-axis when the signal is along the z-axis, for example. These geometry-based techniques struggle, however, in the common situation where noise and signal affect the sensor from the same direction.

In a recent paper published in the journal npj Quantum Information, Layden and QEG leader Paola Cappellaro, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering, unveil a novel way of applying established ECQS correction techniques to signal and noise that emanate from the same direction. This approach allows frequency-independent filtering, because it exploits spatial rather than temporal noise correlations.

“The usual way of looking at error correction, for quantum computing, was to cast as wide a net as possible to correct as much as you could,” says Layden. “In sensing applications, you instead want a very carefully shaped hole in your net to let through the specific signal you’re looking for. In effect, we’re adapting existing signal processing techniques for use in quantum devices. What’s surprising is how seamlessly these apparently unrelated ideas from quantum computing and signal processing fit together.”

Distinguishing signal from noise, the central requirement for noise-reduction techniques in quantum sensors, can be done in several ways. In addition to the geometric approach used in past ECQS techniques, researchers have exploited the fact that noise in many quantum devices is not completely unpredictable, but can instead be full of correlations. Dynamical decoupling, for instance, makes use of noise correlations at different times. Analogously, the QEG researchers’ new ECQS scheme makes use of noise correlations at different positions in a quantum sensor. In this way, the new approach can tell signal from noise even in the common case where both are in the same direction, say, along the z-axis.

Layden and Cappellaro’s approach is complementary to existing DD and ECQS methods, which is helpful because noise sources vary widely in different sensing applications. A diversity of filtering tools is desirable — and the new method could also open the door to quantum sensors that can correct for noise in all three spatial dimensions.

While development to date has been largely mathematical, experimental work is under way in the QEG’s laboratories, including evaluation of the noise challenges facing different types of quantum systems. “We’ve been working on getting something similar up and running,” explains Layden. Small-scale implementations have only recently become possible; while there are many theoretical ideas about how larger-scale quantum devices could operate, it’s likely that any practical near-term advances will come at intermediate scales, where the new QEG-developed techniques could prove especially useful.

Layden and Cappellaro are also working with collaborators at Yale University to advance the theoretical side of their project; funding is provided by the U.S. Army Research Office, the National Science Foundation, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

“We’re not quite at the stage of getting experimental results yet, but we’re building hardware and doing simulations, and the interplay of going back and forth really shapes not just this project but several related ones as well,” adds Layden.

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Developing new ways to advance copper production

MIT associate professor of metallurgy Antoine Allanore has received a $1.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) to run larger scale tests of a new way to produce copper using electricity to separate copper from melted sulfur-based minerals, which are the main source of copper.

One of Allanore's primary goals is to make high-purity copper that can go directly into production of copper wire, which is in increasing demand for applications from renewable energy to electric vehicles. Production of electric and hybrid cars and buses is expected to rise from 3.1 million vehicles in 2017 to 27.2 million by 2027, with an accompanying nine-fold increase in demand for copper from 204,000 metric tons to 1.9 million metric tons (2.09 million U.S. tons) over the same period, according to a March 2017 IDTechEx report commissioned by the International Copper Association (ICA).

In June 2017, researchers in Allanore’s lab identified how to selectively separate pure copper and other metallic elements from sulfide mineral ore in one step. Their molten sulfide electrolysis process eliminates sulfur dioxide, a noxious byproduct of traditional copper extraction methods, instead producing pure elemental sulfur.

“We think that with our technology we could provide these copper wires with less energy consumption and higher productivity,” Allanore says. It may be possible to cut the energy needed for making copper by 20 percent.

In earlier research, postdoc Sulata K. Sahu and graduate student Brian J. Chmielowiec ’12, decomposed sulfur-rich minerals at high temperature into pure sulfur and extracted three different metals at very high purity: copper, molybdenum, and rhenium. The process is similar to the Hall-Héroult process, which uses electrolysis to produce aluminum, but operates at a higher operating temperature to enable production of liquid copper.

Currently, it takes multiple steps to separate out copper, first crushing sulfide minerals, and then floating out the copper-bearing parts. This copper-rich material — copper concentrate — is next partially refined in a smelter, and further purified with electrolytic refining. “Professor Allanore’s approach would work on the copper concentrate and has the potential to produce copper rod in a single operation while separating unwanted impurities and recovering valuable byproducts that are also in the concentrate,” says Hal Stillman, director of technology development and transfer for the International Copper Association. “Professor Allanore’s approach is a big step; it allows a completely new approach to refining copper.”

The three-year, $1.89 million DOE award will allow Allanore’s group to make a larger reactor, producing about 10 times as much liquid copper per hour, and to run the reactor for a longer time, enough to identify what happens to the other metals accompanying copper, which are also commercially important.

Allanore’s group effort began this year, and he hopes it will provide the data needed to move on to a pilot plant within three years. “We are aiming to be ready to provide the design criteria, the material and operating conditions of a one metric ton per day demonstration reactor,” Allanore says. “If everything is successful, that’s what we will deliver.”

Key technical challenges to overcome are proving the durability of the process over a longer time period and verifying the purity of the metals that are made in the process. Some of the byproducts of copper production, selenium, for example, are valuable in their own right.

“The revolution that we are proposing is that only one reactor would do everything. It would make the liquid copper product and allow us to recover elemental sulfur, and allows us to recover selenium,” Allanore says. “We are using electricity, and electrons can be very selective, so we are using electrons in a manner that enables the most efficient separation of the products of the chemical process.”

Conventional pyrometallurgy produces copper by burning the ore in air, requires four steps and produces noxious compounds like sulfur dioxide (SO₂) that require secondary processing into sulfuric acid. The initial batch of copper also requires further processing. “It leaves behind copper metal with too much sulfur and too much oxygen, too much for downstream direct wire production,” Allanore says.

Allanore lab’s new molten sulfide electrolysis method better handles trace metals and other elements impurities that come with the copper, allowing for separation of multiple elements at high purity from the same production process. “Therefore, we can rethink the manufacturing process of copper wires,” Allanore says.

“The essential part is about providing the sector — mining companies, existing smelting companies and existing copper producers — some data that show what happens on longer operations and at a larger scale,” Allanore says.

The International Copper Association conducted a Life Cycle Assessment that identified several areas where the copper industry can improve its environmental footprint. The study indicates the industry needs to continue reducing on-site sulfur dioxide emissions and to get its electricity from sources that are more environmentally friendly. Allanore’s project is relevant to both these issues. “If developed and deployed, it has the potential to decrease energy demand, operate entirely on renewable energy, and reduce sulfur dioxide emissions,” ICA technology director Stillman says. “In addition, it can separate unwanted impurities and recover valuable by-products from the concentrate. Right now, the technical evidence that is creating excitement is a small-scale proof-of-principle demonstration. It’s great that EERE has provided the needed initial funding to explore the potential. If the process works at larger scale, it could be the type of revolutionary approach that the industry is seeking.”

Allanore’s award is one of 24 early-stage, innovative technology projects receiving up to $35 million in support. It was announced this year by the U.S. Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Advanced Manufacturing Office earlier this year.

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