Success story: From the mine to your battery: Quantum technology speeds up critical mineral extraction

Driving along rural roads in Canada, you'll often see solar farms and wind turbines. You may also pass fields of food crops being fertilized. And on any given day, you're likely to spot a few electric vehicles or may take photos with your mobile phone—or maybe even using a drone.

What's not as obvious in our daily life are the materials essential for the batteries powering these everyday products and technologies: critical minerals such as lithium, graphite, nickel and cobalt. Critical minerals are at the heart of wind turbines and solar panels, batteries for electric vehicles and storing energy, electronics and semiconductors, alloys and as raw materials for many industrial processes. They can even contribute to healthy growth in plants. In fact, rare minerals touch almost every facet of daily living.

The demand for critical minerals continues to soar, driven by the increasing need for green technologies. This puts extreme pressure on the mining industry to extract critical minerals more quickly and more efficiently—and to uncover new deposits. But this industry is not as well established as the gold or iron mining industries because critical minerals are often treated as by-products of the mining operations for other metals.

Thanks to funding from the Internet of Things: Quantum Sensors Challenge program at the National Research Council of Canada (NRC), multidisciplinary research teams from the NRC and the University of Ottawa (uOttawa) have broken ground toward fast-tracking mineral processing. Their solution moves minerals analysis from the lab to the field, speeding the process from days to minutes.

"Even the smallest economies made during extraction and processing can snowball into massive savings that have a huge impact on mining operations," says Dr. Martin Couillard from the NRC's Clean Energy Innovation Research Centre. "Getting faster feedback in the field also means that processes will generate higher yields at less cost and reduce environmental waste by requiring fewer chemicals to classify different ores."

In their research, the NRC–uOttawa teams tested the limits of existing extraction and analysis tools and identified new quantum devices that push beyond those boundaries. The team worked with SGS Canada, one of the world's premier mineral analysis firms, to demonstrate the technology on commercial mining samples.

This new generation of quantum technologies can leverage and control previously inaccessible properties of nature. It presents stunning new capabilities such as sensors that boast precision and sensitivity far beyond the limitations of those in use today.

Mining for savings

Traditional sample treatment requires drying an ore specimen and mounting and polishing it before sending it to the lab for analysis, using an expensive and sensitive electron microscope. The team's new approach uses a nonlinear optical microscope that is simple and robust enough to use on site, where the minerals are being processed. The device uses NRC-patented optical techniques based on ultrafast lasers that can analyze samples in 3D with minimum preparation, even if they're in wet mineral slurry (finely ground mineral particles suspended in water).

"Our next step will be to use quantum light sources, which should reduce the noise and remove conflicting signals emanating from different trace elements and minerals," says Dr. Adrian Pegoraro from the NRC's Metrology Research Centre. "By intensifying the signals and distinguishing among them, this technology further accelerates the operation."

While developed for lithium mining, the technique can be applied to mining of any kind of ore anywhere in the world. For example, future work will include gold extraction because the technique offers advantages over slow and costly electron microscopy analysis systems.

In collaboration with Dr. Albert Stolow, a professor at uOttawa's Faculty of Science and Canada Research Chair in Molecular Photonics, the team uses something called multi-modal nonlinear optical (NLO) microscopy. To find out more about this method, read their research on multi-modal NLO microscopy published in Scientific Reports.

Initially developed for biomedical imaging, NLO microscopy methods can apply equally to the study of specific mineral compounds within ores and rocks in a label-free manner. This possibility launched an entirely new field—geophotonics—that combines the generation, detection and manipulation of photons, or electromagnetic radiation, with the study of the earth and its environment.

"We are simulating the generation of squeezed light, working closely with the experimental team members in the design of a quantum source that minimizes the noise intrinsic to lasers," says Lora Ramunno, professor at the University of Ottawa, fellow at the Max Planck–uOttawa Centre for Extreme and Quantum Photonics and a former Canada Research Chair in Computational Nanophotonics. "Once this quantum source is used within a microscope, we will use detailed numerical simulations to understand the image formation process, which we expect to be more complicated than for classical light sources."

Prospecting for prosperity

Mining represents a significant part of the Canadian economy, so finding solutions to enhance yields is an important step toward the future. They will contribute to fulfilling the vision stated in The Canadian Critical Minerals Strategy, to increase the supply of responsibly sourced critical minerals and support the development of domestic and global value chains for the green and digital economy.

In this NRC–uOttawa project, the successful collaboration among academia, government and industry has led to a key development in quantum sensor technology for the mining sector and a patent in geophotonics. The research also showed how the technology can contribute to optimizing mining operations—improving efficiency, productivity and profitability.

"We're investing a lot in quantum technology in Canada, and this project is an example of the contributions we can make to solve problems that will have a real impact now," says Dr. Marina Gertsvolf, Program Director of the Internet of Things: Quantum Sensors Challenge program.

The project is supported by grants and contributions awarded through the Collaborative Science, Technology and Innovation Program, administered by the NRC's National Program Office. For more information on this research area, send an email to NRC.QuantumSensors-CapteursQuantiques.CNRC@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca.

"Our next step will be to use quantum light sources, which should reduce the noise and remove conflicting signals emanating from different trace elements and minerals," Dr. Adrian Pegoraro from the NRC's Metrology Research Centre. "By intensifying the signals and distinguishing among them, this technology further accelerates the operation."

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