PNNL

The Non-Equilibrium Transport Driven Separations (NETS) Initiative is developing and evaluating next-generation separation strategies targeting critical materials. The NETS science mission is focused on transitioning contemporary separations away from slow and energy-intensive approaches by using external stimuli to introduce far-from-equilibrium conditions conducive to selective nucleation. These innovative methodologies aim to advance beyond traditional approaches, based on adsorbents, membranes, ligands, and specialty chemicals, to achieve robust critical materials extraction from abundant, domestically sourced, unconventional resources. The initiative will develop a pathway for a sustainable domestic supply chain of critical materials to support national security and accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy.

The NETS Initiative builds on Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's internationally recognized strengths in interfacial chemical sciences, leveraging recent advances in state-of-the-art experimental capabilities and theoretical modeling. Our integrated and multidisciplinary approach is targeted at developing novel capabilities for the separation of critical materials from unconventional sources, resulting in a paradigm shift in separation science. The overarching goals of NETS are to:

1. Predict, establish, and control far-from-equilibrium transport and reactivity driven by external fields.
2. Build enduring novel capabilities to visualize, analyze, predict, and control interfacial separation processes across spatiotemporal scales.
3. Validate and verify the adaptability and scalability of the external field-driven separation methodology with complex real-word feedstocks.

A distinguishing advantage of the NETS approach to separations is the ability to leverage online sensors to develop tunable, real-time process control to alter external stimuli. This adaptability is crucial to effectively and economically separating critical materials from feedstocks where composition and concentration vary dramatically from site to site and evolve over time. The NETS team is developing a foundational molecular understanding of far-from-equilibrium separation processes and validating their scalability and applicability to realistic feedstocks.