Earth Day 2024: Innovative solutions to global issues
Cleaning the planet's water, creating more-recyclable plastics and designing the batteries needed for the clean energy transition, every day is Earth Day at PME
Prashant Kumar of the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (left) and Srinivasa Balivada of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at UChicago prepare to take water quality measurements along the Ganga River in India using a mobile sensor platform based measurement and mapping technique developed by PME Professor Supratik Guha and his team. (Photo by Saba Mundlay)
April 22, 2024, marks the 54th annual Earth Day, a date on which 192 countries around the globe honor and recognize the need for a cleaner, more sustainable environment.
At the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, that commitment is a daily one.
ExPost Technology is backed by a team of leading researchers, including battery expert Shirley Meng from the University of Chicago, seen here discussing her work on batteries while standing near a glove box at Argonne National Laboratory.
Resurgence startup ExPost awarded $8M from DOE in bid to improve battery recycling
ExPost Technology, a participant in the Polsky Center's Cohort 1 of Resurgence and which has UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering Professor Y. Shirley Meng as a scientific advisor, has been awarded $8 million by the U.S. Department of Energy to support development of an advanced mobile machinery system for pre-processing consumer electronics and batteries.
The startup’s patent-pending process – Purification-Regeneration Integrated Materials Engineering (PRIME) – removes impurities from recycled lithium battery materials to enable their reuse. The DOE grant will help support development of the first step in this: preprocessing batteries in a way that there is no fire hazard or leaking of toxic materials.
Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering graduate student Sam Marsden is working on creating a more recyclable form of plastic to replace high-density polyethylene, one of the most produced plastics on the planet. It’s the plastic commonly used in milk jugs. He plans to move on from there to new materials that will replace two other large scale production plastics, low-density polyethylene and polypropylene. However, he understands that manufacturers will only adopt new materials if the price and properties are competitive.
That’s why Marsden is bolstering his PME education with science policy and international climate policy courses from UChicago’s Harris School of Public Policy. The perfect material in the lab means nothing if it doesn’t go into the market.
UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering Asst. Prof. Chong Liu, right, is creating new methods of lithium extraction that can be applied directly into water sources with minimum pretreatment. (Photo by John Zich)
Finding a better path to lithium
Extracting lithium from Australian mines, Chilean brine pools or clay deposits underneath Nevada, can be a painfully slow, expensive and environmentally damaging process. But batteries powering everything from smartphones to energy storage for wind farms and solar fields demand the metallic element.
UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering Asst. Prof. Chong Liu is developing better ways to not only supply high quantities of lithium, but to do so in an environmentally friendly way.
By researching the physical and chemical processes at solid-liquid interfaces for sustainable separation, Liu has created new ways to separate dilute ions from the water. This could be used to pull lithium, rare earth elements and other scarce materials directly from water – no mining or brine evaporation needed.
The University of Chicago, the University of Chicago Trust in India, and IBM will collaborate to transform water quality management in the state of Maharashtra, India, providing key government and nonprofit organizations with essential tools to access to water quality data. (Photo by Krishna Chaitanya)
Pritzker Molecular Engineering, IBM pilot program to help target pollution hot spots in India
Water-to-Cloud, a mobile sensor platform-based measurement and mapping technique developed by Pritzker Molecular Engineering Professor Supratik Guha and his team, is changing the way India targets sources of water pollution.
Prof. Junhong Chen is the co-Principal Investigator and Use-Inspired R&D Lead for Great Lakes ReNEW, a coalition that plans to used filtered-out metals from wastewater into new types of batteries. (Photo by John Zich)
UChicago engineer driving key role in Great Lakes water transformation
The award will be used in part to recycle used water, creating a clean water resource, and also to transform filtered-out waste metals into new types of batteries that help power the nation’s switch to clean energy. The initial service area will be Illinois, Wisconsin and Ohio, but over the collaborative agreement’s 10-year run, it will expand to Michigan, Minnesota and Indiana.
Researchers at Pritzker Molecular Engineering, including CQE IBM postdoctoral scholar Junyu Liu, and collaborators show in a new paper how incorporating quantum computing into the classical machine learning process can potentially help make machine learning more sustainable and efficient. (Photo by John Zich)
New research unites quantum engineering and artificial intelligence
GPT-3, the initial learning model behind the popular ChatGPT chatbot, took $12 million to train. Providing the power for that massive computational task produced more than 500 tons CO2 equivalent emissions. Similar information has not been made public on GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 – the current models used to train ChatGPT – but the costs in cash and carbon are believed to be much larger.
An interdisciplinary team including Prof. Liang Jiang and CQE IBM postdoctoral scholarJunyu Liu from the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, UChicago graduate students Minzhao Liu and Ziyu Ye, Argonne computational scientist Yuri Alexeev, and researchers from UC Berkeley, MIT, Brandeis University and Freie Universität Berlin hope to change that.
In a paper published in Nature Communications, the team showed how incorporating quantum computing into the classical machine-learning process can potentially help make machine learning more sustainable and efficient.
Sonia Vohra, MSME’21, working as a materials engineer at Phoenix Tailings, where she was hired after graduating from UChicago Pritzker Molecular Engineering. Vohra is currently pursuing a PhD in chemical and environmental engineering at Brown University. (Image courtesy Sonia Vohra/Phoenix Tailings)
Pivoting to engineering to help clean up the environment
Sonia Vohra felt destined to have a career in science, but her path wasn’t always clear. While growing up in Las Vegas, she demonstrated her fascination with the natural world and loved exploring the rocks and plants of her mother’s garden. Moreover, her favorite classes in school always involved science and math.
She ultimately pursued an undergraduate degree in foreign service, albeit with an emphasis on science, technology, and international affairs. A marine biology research experience on a remote island in Panama made her realize that the type of scientific career she craved was more technical and environmentally-oriented. To help make that pivot, she joined the first cohort of the master’s degree program at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME), pursuing the polymer science and engineering track.
