Establishment of the Center for Advanced Separation Technologies

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONThe U.S. is the largest producer of mining products in the world. In 1999, U.S. mining operations produced $66.7 billion worth of raw materials that contributed a total of $533 billion to the nation's wealth. Despite these contributions, the mining industry has not been well supported with research and development funds as compared to mining industries in other countries. To overcome this problem, the Center for Advanced Separation Technologies (CAST) was established by Virginia Tech and West Virginia University to develop technologies that can be used by the U.S. mining industry to create new products, reduce production costs, and meet environmental regulations. This endeavor is supported through U.S. DOE Cooperative Agreement No. DE-FC26-01NT41091: Establishment of the Center for Advance Separation Technologies.Much of the research to be carried out at CAST will be longer-term, high-risk, basic research, and will be carried out in four broad areas: a) Solid-solid separation b) Solid-liquid separation c) Chemical/Biological extraction, and d) Sensor and control development.Distribution of funds has been handled via competitive solicitation of research proposals through Site Coordinators at the two universities. Two RFP's have been issued to date. The first of these, referred to as the CAST I -Round 1 RFP, was issued on August 17, 2001 and closed October 15, 2001. A total of 12 proposals were received in response to this first RFP. These were first reviewed and ranked by a group of technical reviewers (selected primarily from industry). Based on these reviews, and an assessment of overall program requirements, the CAST Technical Committee made an initial selection/ranking of proposals and forwarded these proposals to the DOE/NETL Project Officer for final review and approval. This process took some 6 months to complete but 8 projects were in place at the constituent universities (5 at Virginia Tech and three at West Virginia University) by May 17, 2002. This was followed, on June 1, 2002 with the CAST I -Round 2 RFP, which closed on July 19, 2002. A total of 12 proposals were received in response to this second RFPfive were selected for funding. These were in place at the constituent universities (2 at Virginia Tech and 3 at West Virginia University) by March 1, 2003.All thirteen of these projects are listed below by category, along with brief abstracts of their aims and objectives. The recovery of coarse particles by flotation is a common problem in the coal and minerals processing industry. The objective of this project is to develop methods of extending the upper particle size limit for flotation. The availability of such a technology will improve processing efficiency and greatly simplify the plant flowsheet. Two different complementary approaches will be used to achieve the project objective. One is to use novel flotation reagents that will help increase the attachment force between air bubbles and coarse particles, and the other is to develop new flotation machines specifically de...