NanoExtract

Pollution related to industrial metal by-products has become a central matter in environmental issues. Moreover, those metals are mainly found in liquid effluents. Indeed, industrials processes generate huge amounts of water containing those metals. For instance, heavy metals can be found amongst effluents of microelectronics or metallic surface treatment industries, strategic metals such as rare earth metals in the sector of green technologies and radionuclides in the nuclear industry. Let’s consider metallic surface treatment industrials whose installations follow a “zero liquid discharge” policy but who are still allowed, in accordance with prefectoral decrees, to discharge processed water into the river. Today, legal concentration standards are in the range of mg/L (Cu 2 mg/L, Zn 1mg/L, Cd 0.2mg/L). However, a lot of pressure from the French and European authorities is put on the legislators to lower those discharge standards in the range of µg/L. Current industrial processes that carry out finishing water treatments will have difficulties satisfying those new standards. Actually, treatment of liquid effluents by ion exchange resins (IER) is the most common process in use. The aim of the present program is to develop a new generation of nano / microfiber materials with much better extraction properties than commonly used IER. Developed by the consortium submitting the project and commercialized by AJELIS, those fibers will be a competitive alternative to IER, both technically and commercially. Beyond their technical efficiency, our new materials will be able to bring environmental and financial benefits to the industrials who are confronted with the treatment of their liquid effluents: the concentration of metals after treatment will fall in the µg/L range; the treatments will be quicker and more environmental friendly (smaller volume of water, of acids …). To achieve these goals, AJELIS, supported by key industrial players in surface treatment, plans to complete three ‘research’ tasks in this program. The first one will focus on the first generation of extracting fiber (cationic type based on polyacrylic acid PAA), which is ready on a research level. A complete industrial qualification has to be performed. The next task aims to widen the range of fiber materials towards a global offer in comparison with the REI (anionic type, strong and weak). And the following task will tackle the problematic of high selectivity extracting fibers thanks to the use of molecular materials. These three tasks will allow AJELIS to propose a complete set of solution for the treatment of liquid effluents containing heavy metals. The three ‘research’ tasks, above-mentioned, will fuel a last task which will collect the data and materials to validate them on an industrial scale. This will be performed by mounting technological demonstrators in the factories of industrial players, which have already volunteered. A complete demonstration of the technical parameters, of the material performances and of their economic viability will be done. The final aim of this program is to collect sufficient data from consumer response for the futher product development. The project outcomes will be a considerable innovation to the worldwide liquid effluent treatment industry.