A trio of students from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering recently got the chance to work with scientists from around the country on a process that might make it easier and less expensive to obtain rare earth elements (REE).
Rare earth elements are a set of seventeen chemical elements in the periodic table—the fifteen lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium. These unusual metals are important in many technologies, including electronics, computers, clean energy, health care, transportation, national defense, and others. Despite their name, they are not all that rare, but unlike typical minerals they are rarely found in pockets or seams and are instead dispersed in low levels of concentration.