To mitigate the environmental impact of traditional mining and ensure the future availability of critical minerals, urban mining is essential. Our focus is to germinate sustainable waste recycling and mineral recovery processes, with an emphasis on adding value to products for economic viability. Our approach integrates climate change considerations at every stage of process development. Starting with a deep understanding of the fundamentals, we analyze reaction kinetics, identify rate-limiting steps, and determine the optimal downstream processes to create a closed-loop system with zero discharge, all while ensuring scalability for the future.

Research Areas

1. Li-ion battery recycling with ultrasonic solvometallurgy: We use deep eutectic solvents as leaching agents, with ultrasound applied to enhance mass transfer and accelerate reactions. This enables efficient metal recovery at near-ambient conditions, reducing the energy demands of traditional solvothermal methods.

2. Metal nanoparticles synthesis in flow based environment: Metal ions can be reduced to metal nanoparticles. This chemistry is done in a flow based environment in milli-channel with enhanced radial mixing to synthesize mono dispersed nanoparticles. For this, hydrodynamics of single phase & multiphase flow with various flow reactor configurations will be studied.

3. Agromining of metals from soil: We determine potential hyperaccumulator plants for target metals. We use those plants to extract metals and these biomass is further processed to recover target metals for battery application.

4. Industrial mineral waste to concrete: We use industrial mineral wastes such as fly ash and blast furnace slag, which are alkali-activated through an optimized process to produce geopolymers as a sustainable alternative to concrete. This approach holds the potential for CO₂ sequestration.