Projects

This Centre of Excellence (CoE) focuses on fostering innovation in resource efficiency, promoting circular economy practices, utilizing local resources, ensuring safe material circulation, and educating researchers to reduce environmental impacts. It centers around four key areas: Strategic Mineral Resources (SMR), Carbon-Based Resources (CBR), Circular Technologies Upscaling (CTU), and Circular Business Eco-System and Modeling (CBEM). The SMR group maps critical materials in waste streams, including renewables, for extraction and reuse while minimizing hazardous waste. The CBR group develops ecofriendly pathways for essential chemicals and plastics, also assessing their environmental impact. The CTU group pioneers waste reduction and recycling methods for aqueous, and solid waste, incl. water purification. The CBEM group analyzes sustainable business ecosystems and value chains. This CoE's interdisciplinary approach will benefit both Estonia and Europe by advancing circular economy.

The project focuses on developing technologies for the separation of valuable components from intermediate products of ore enrichment and used magnets that are supplied to Estonia or potentially supplied. The emphasis is on characterizing the best possible raw materials, intermediates, and products during the development of separation technologies. This includes favoring liquid-assisted mechanochemical processes through the selective formation of metal-organic complexes and adhering to the principles of circular and green chemistry. The objectives of the project are: a) analysis of samples generated from the recycling of ores and their enriched intermediate products, as well as magnets containing metals; b) development and valorization of separation technologies for rare earth metals, utilizing mechanochemical methods and metal-organic complexes; c) evaluating the sustainability of the developed processes using the metrics of green chemistry

The infrastructure brings together the capabilities in chemical synthesis, chemical and biotechnology in Estonia. Its primary goal is the development and technologization of new sustainable and environmentally friendly synthesis methods, such as mechanosynthesis, flow chemistry, electrochemistry, photochemistry, and organocatalysis. New chemical methods (using enzymes, ionic liquids, and metal-organic frameworks) creates new opportunities for obtaining complex natural compounds. To ensure the sustainability of methods and materials, safety studies are conducted. The shared use of the infrastructure initiates new interdisciplinary projects and creates prerequisites for innovation and collaboration with research-intensive companies. Involving the use of infrastructure at all levels of higher education and in micro-degree programs ensures continuity in science and a qualified personnel for entrepreneurship.

EML brings together the high-level infrastructure of understanding and application of magnetism and electromagnetism of four partners - University of Tartu, Tallinn University of Technology, Institute of Chemical and Biological Physics, and Metrosert with the aim of enabling extensive use of this expertise and knowledge by companies and the public sector, also in order to achieve TAIE and Estonia 2035 goals. EML partners with NEO materials (Sillamäe) and magnet (Narva) factories. EML includes three distributed core laboratories - Magnets and magnetic materials, Recycling of rare elements, and Electro-magnetism applications - bringing together the versatile know-how of EMLpartners. The laboratories provide top-level electromagnetic analysis expertise, develop methodologies, offer scientific and industrial magnetic analyzes, and provide professional training. EML represents Estonia in international organizations (EMA, EMFL, NHMFL, COST) and participates in numerous international projects.

Sensing, capturing and separating enantiomers is important for environmental safety, agricultural chemistry, and drug design. The use of hemicucurbiturils is an effective strategy because of the combination of various monomers in a single-step templated mechanochemical synthesis. Due to the absence of bulk solvent the self-organizing efficiency is amplified and there is less waste - the process is green and sustainable. The current work will study the fundamentals of self-organization of hemicucurbiturils, the binding (capturing) of chiral molecules, and detecting chirality using supramolecular complexes. In the long term, the empirical observations will be combined with results from computational chemistry and cheminformatics to build models for predicting necessary monomers and reaction conditions to form macrocycles with desired properties. The outcomes of the project are expected to be highly useful for organizations and industries that monitor, use, or manufacture chiral compounds

NdFeB are the strongest and highest energy density permanent magnets used in both green energy production in wind generators and electric cars. NdFeB production technology is comparable to that of lithium battery: both are of key importance, require limited mineral resources to be mined, recycling is difficult. The recycling of NdFeB would reduce the EU's dependence on China being more economical and cheaper compared to mining. The project focuses on the development of recycling of sintered NdFeB. We focus on hydrogen decrepitation and HDDR technologies for NdFeB magnets, while also consider alternatives. The input of the technological process is NdFeB collected from circulation and the output is a NdFeB semi-product that can be used in a sintered, bonded, ALD covered or 3D printed NdFeB industrially scalable production pot. The largest NdFeB plant in the EU is under construction in Narva. The methods developed in the project would help improve existing processes for circular economy.

As the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere continue to rise, methods for alleviation are desperately needed. Instead of a greenhouse gas, CO2 can also be a valuable resource, but this requires technology to split it up. Among the proposed technologies to split CO2 is its capture and electrolysis in molten salts, turning CO2 into solid carbon and gaseous oxygen. This project aims to further this technology by looking closely at the processes taking place and creating new ways of valorizing the products to create a financial incentive for scaling. Smart utilization of this powerful technology will allow us to not only directly reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, but also to limit future emissions by empowering CO2-free energy conversion devices such as fuel cells, batteries, and supercapacitors. To keep the CO2 equivalents low and to not offset the positive effect of CO2 capture and utilization, the effect of green chemistry principles and their utilization will also be studied.