Chromatography

The pillar of circularity

Superior Refining Technology

Engineered and calibrated to be a smaller, faster, and lower-cost refining solution. First principles engineering provides our platform with scalability alongside lower overall costs and footprint compared to the industry standard solvent extraction refineries spanning 100+ acres consuming large quantities of energy, water, and harsh chemicals.

Modularity

Our technology is engineered to refine large volumes of rare earth or critical battery elements or to be plugged into an existing processing site column by column to meet our partner's refining needs.

Scalability

The platform scales according to our partner's volume specifications by adding additional chromatography columns to expand the purification and separation resin surface binding area.

Deployability

Small space requirements mean the entire platform can be transported in a large shipping container and transferred directly to our partner's site for local and decentralized refining.

Circularity

Predictive model design enables the same processing technology to be used for natural mineral ores and recycled end-of-life materials introducing true circularity to the supply chain for the first time.

Purification & Separation Columns

One system; two product lines engineered and calibrated to be a smaller, faster, and lower-cost than conventional refining technologies. Our process relies on the same core purification and separation platform to separately produce cathode active materials and rare earth elements.

Born from over four decades of research at purdue university

Technology Origins

Professor Linda Nien-hwa Wang, of Purdue University began her research over 40 years ago designing a portable artificial kidney. Her initial research into multicomponent competitive adsorption phenomena in a fixed bed ultimately led to the maturation of chromatography as an economically viable solution for purifying and separating minerals. From those early days with limited publicized literature on chromatography applied to mineral processing, Professor Wang was able to create what former Purdue Research Foundation President, Dan Hasler, called, “the most important patent Purdue has ever produced.”

Commericializtion by american resources corporation

Commercial Development

In 2020, Professor Wang’s research was identified by American Resources Corporation co-founders. The patent was initially developed as an innovative refining solution for rare earth elements concentrated in coal production byproducts and coal mine pond tailings. The technology was soon after commercialized beyond the original scope and brought online to process all feedstock types of the two primary product streams, rare earth and critical battery elements.

An Industry solution transforming refining economics

Rebuilding the Future

Our technology leverages the highly-efficient and large binding area of our processing column resin. The resin enables a train of processing columns to replace a large centralized refining facility and shrink the process footprint to the size of a large shipping container ready to be deployed on mine or manufacturing sites around the world.

Technology FAQ

What is chromatography?

The word chromatography originated from greek; “chroma” means “color" and “graph” means “to write”. The word was coined in early 20th century by botanist Mikhail Tsvet when he observed different pigments with different colors from plants migrated at different velocity in a separation medium and achieved separation of these pigments. ReElement has engineered chromatography method to allow metal ions with different colors to "write into” different high purity products.

Why does ReElement use chromatography?

Compared to conventional solvent exaction methods, chromatography methods are more efficient because of orders of magnitude higher interfacial area in the chromatography. Just 1 gram of sorbent used in chromatography can have hundreds of square meters of area inside. This leads to much higher efficiency for separation, lower chemical and energy consumption, and smaller footprint.

Why other people don’t use chromatography method for the purification?

Compared to conventional separation methods, chromatography systems are much more complex. For example, a simple ternary separation would involve more than 20 parameters in the system design and optimization. Experimental trial and error approaches to find the optimal operation conditions involving all these parameters would not be possible as each experiment can take days. ReElement prioritize the understanding of fundamental chromatography theories and uses intrinsic engineering parameters based and rate model simulation aided design and optimization approach, which allows ReElement’s technology to be flexible in terms of feedstock composition and operation scales.

What is the "Powered by ReElement" solution?

Powered by ReElement is a collaborative solution where we evaluate a partner's facility or process to determine if our proprietary chromatography columns can be integrated. This integration can help lower refining costs or the costs associated with treating process waste streams. Instead of building and maintaining expensive hydrometallurgical processes, our Powered by ReElement solution offers a simpler, more cost-effective alternative to achieve the same results. Our columns are modular, allowing the system to scale based on our partner's specific needs, which can lead to significant capital expenditure savings.