Mine-on-a-chip: megascale opportunities for microfluidics in critical materials and minerals recovery

Abstract

The rising supply gap for metal resources essential to energy, defense, and consumer technologies—the critical minerals and materials—poses one of the most pressing bottlenecks toward energy and national security. A suite of challenges ranging from resource definition to extraction and refining, however, undergird the economic feasibility and cradle-to-grave sustainability of these technologies. Myriad opportunities exist to leverage the unique advantages of microfluidics – low sample and reagent consumption, parallel processing, and rapid and low-cost testing – to understand and improve existing approaches for materials characterization, extraction, chemical analyses, reagent screening, separation. This perspective identifies key gaps and opportunities in securing the supply of minerals and materials critical to energy sustainability and aims to galvanize the lab on a chip (LoC) community in this crucial research.