EUROPE: New methods to clean up industrial processes

The EU will provide EUR1 million (US$1.4 million) to help a team of UK researchers at Leicester University develop a range of ionic liquid solvents to provide safe, non-toxic alternatives to harmful solutions used in industrial processes. One aim is to improve the working conditions of people exposed to carcinogenic toxic acids and electrolytes that are used in some processes, such as those relating to commercial metal finishing and energy storage.

The money has been made available through the EU's seventh framework programme that funds research projects internationally, and especially in Europe. It has been funnelled through the IONMET project, which links Leicester with high-tech materials businesses and other universities such as University of Clausthal, Germany, and research centres, such as the European Institute of Printed Circuits in the Netherlands.

IONMET has been running for four-and-a-half years and has identified a number of promising research areas.

"New funding will allow the researchers to produce new ionic liquid solvent technologies and apply those developed under the original project to different manufacturing processes," the project team says.

Senior lecturer Dr Karl Ryder, who is overseeing the project, says one of the project's main goals is to improve the working environment for people in the manufacturing industry by replacing unpleasant acids or caustic processes with ionic liquids.

"The user experience is very similar for both and no additional equipment or training is required, but the user benefits from a more pleasant and safer working environment," Dr Ryder says.

Three projects have been singled out for assistance following ideas developed over the past few years: POLYZION, to create an environmentally friendly and affordable rechargeable battery for electric vehicle applications; RECONIF, which uses environmentally sustainable ionic liquid solvents to extract metals from solid waste instead of strong acids or caustic alkalis; and ASPIS, which seeks to develop a new technology for surface treatment of circuit boards to replace the expensive and often troublesome processes used today.

The framework IONMET project claims to be "an outstanding project for a good cooperation and cross-link between the academic community, the public sector and political communities and a commercially minded audience often responsible for the implementation of new applications".

The team says electroplating and metal finishing had traditionally been based on aqueous chemistry which effectively limited the range of possible metal finishes and their processes while the processing of metal finishing had involved dangerous and highly corrosive chemicals.

IONMET, on the contrary, is revolutionising the field "with a brace of radical new technologies based on a generic group of ionic liquid solvents."

alan.osborn@uw-news.com