Xiaobo Chen
University of Missouri-Kansas City, MO·Chemistry
Discarded electronics contain valuable gold, and recovering it brings both environmental and financial benefits. Gold is the most valuable part of a global e-waste recycling market worth about $55 billion in 2022.
- Fields
Chemistry
Engineering
Materials Science
- Topics
gold recovery
electronic waste
e-waste recycling
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Design and synthesize three series of triazine-crosslinked polyethyleneimine (TCPEI) porous polymers with very different distributions of amine nitrogen types.
- Measure and theoretically model the gold ion adsorption capacities and binding energies of the three TCPEI series.
- Determine how fast gold ions are adsorbed and released by TCPEIs using combined experimental and theoretical kinetics studies.
- Test how selectively TCPEIs capture gold over other metal ions in e-waste, including lead, mercury, nickel, cobalt, cadmium, chromium, iron and copper.
More about the research
Adsorption, in which a solid material captures metal ions from a liquid, is simple, cheap and environmentally benign. Current adsorbents for gold, however, hold too little, work too slowly and also capture other metals. This project asks how to design porous polymers that grab gold quickly, in large amounts and selectively.
Why it matters
Better adsorbents could make recovering gold from electronic waste faster, cheaper and cleaner, benefiting recyclers and reducing waste. The same design principles may extend to capturing other critical metals, including those needed for rechargeable batteries. This could support domestic supply chains for the energy and defense sectors.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Kristopher Waynant
University of Idaho, ID·Chemistry
Design azothioformamide-based redox-active ligands that oxidatively dissolve zerovalent metals from e-waste, and identify which structural features control dissolution and metal selectivity using combined computation and experiment.
Amisha Shah
Purdue University, IN·Engineering
Measure baseline concentrations of critical metals in leachates from US municipal solid waste landfills, which are currently unknown.
Brent Sumerlin
University of Florida, FL·Chemistry
Develop pendant squarate esters as a new catalyst-free bond-exchange chemistry for vitrimers, reshapable crosslinked polymers that flow when heated.
The school
University of Missouri-Kansas City: 7 labs on PI Pages, $57M a year on research, 94 research doctorates a year.
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