Faradic Technologies

 for the future

To apply Direct Molten Salt Electrolysis for the production of green products.

Michael Faraday was a humble individual who seldom sought publicity for his numerous scientific and engineering discoveries in electricity and electrochemistry. Yet his work was the basis for later scientists such as James Clark Maxwell and Albert Einstein to develop their theories of electromagnetism.

Faraday’s work on electromagnetism tends to outshine his indeed equally fundamental statement of the two laws of electrolysis; the first, that the amount of chemical change is proportional to the quantity of electricity passed through a solution; and the second, that the amounts of different substances deposited, or dissolved, via equal quantities of electricity are proportional to their chemical equivalent weights.

Faraday, along with his colleague William Whewell, also developed the nomenclature, based on Greek language,  for today’s field of electrochemistry, introducing expressions such as electrode, cathode, anode and ion.

Overall, Faraday’s work laid the foundation for numerous groundbreaking advances in the electrowinning of metals and related fields of science.

Faradic Technologies’ objective is based on Faraday electrochemical theories, which is to extract metal and metal alloys from metallic oxides utilising what is termed Direct Molten Salt Electrolysis (DMSE). This will open up new metallurgical processing routes that will contribute to the decarbonisation of the metallurgical industries.

The majority of metals originate as ores, mostly in the form of metallic oxides. The metal ion in the ore must be reduced to its pure metal form either chemically or electrochemically, with carbon, hydrogen or reactive metals serving as the reductant.

Chemical reduction became the accepted norm for the production of most metals, including iron. For the latter this was because hematite as the principal ore of interest and carbon as the reductant were both widely available.

The situation gradually changed as other metals emerged as an important part of world economics which required more complex extraction processes. Electrochemical reduction processes were developed that are today the standard for the extraction of aluminium, magnesium, lithium, sodium and the rare earths. Especially well known is the Hall-Héroult process for the winning of aluminium, in which the aluminium is extracted from aluminium oxide dissolved in cryolite melt, while the oxygen is reacted with carbon and admitted to the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide.

The growing requirement to reduce environmental pollution and global warming has made legislators state rules and regulations to control carbon emissions, and this has had, and will continuously have, direct effects within the metallurgical industries. The first response from many sectors was to consider hydrogen gas as a possible solution despite the complications of formation, transportation and storage.

As another alternative, it was considered to extend electrochemical extraction techniques to metals that are usually won via chemical, and often environmentally unfriendly, processes. Researchers in diverse institutes around the world have evaluated approaches for the electrolytic extraction of various metals. The solution that has arguably gained most prominence is the FFC process developed at the University of Cambridge in England. This has in the meantime been validated for a range of metals including iron, chromium, nickel, titanium, zirconium, niobium, tantalum, tungsten, silicon and uranium as well as numerous alloys of these.

The FFC process has now established itself as an important variant of the DMSE processes. It can in general terms be described as the application of electrolysis utilising a high-temperature salt bath to directly extract a metal from its metallic oxide. In such an electrolytic cell, the cathode comprises the metallic ore which is converted to a metallic sponge, and the anode serves to remove the oxygen. 

While the easiest approach is to use carbon as the anode to react with the oxygen and release carbon dioxide, there are, crucially, other adaptations that ensure that only oxygen is released.

The main barrier to the wide-scale development of the DMSE process varied for each metal. In the case of iron it was the huge cost of replacing existing large-scale equipment, in the case of titanium and other metals it was the difficulty of developing an industrial-scale process to replace those currently in operation despite their higher carbon footprints.