January 16, 2020: A year-long project between lead battery recycling firm Gopher Resource and the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been launched to try to advance the sustainability of lead, Gopher announced on December 18.
The Reverb Furnace Productivity Project, the first of its kind for lead furnaces, will look at how to improve reverberatory furnaces, which transform battery scrap into high-purity lead without allowing the material being processed to come into contact with fuel.
“The learning gained from this project will enable Gopher Resource to make effective design and process changes that increase the energy efficiency of our reverb furnaces,” said Alexandra Anderson, an engineer with Gopher Resource and the research project’s principle investigator. “That will reduce the overall amount of energy needed for the continued recycling of lead batteries.”
The project is funded by a $2 million US Department of Energy ‘High Performance Computing for Energy Innovation’ initiative, which is ‘meant to advance the national energy innovation agenda’.
It means the project can use the ORNL’s Summit Supercomputer, the fastest supercomputer in the world, which was developed by IBM especially for the laboratory and was unveiled by the ORNL in June 2018. It is capable of doing 200,000 trillion calculations per second, or 200 petaflops.
“The main objective of the project is to better understand the impact of various furnace design and operational parameters on overall energy efficiency, productivity and refractory lifetime for Gopher Resource’s reverb furnaces,” the company said. “Summit will model the complex, multiphysics interactions that occur within our reverb furnaces. The computer’s HPC will significantly increase model complexity and reduce the time needed to obtain computational results.”
Anderson said the project had a potential impact on the complete value chain for the battery industry, and that it could also be applied to other metals manufacturing processes.
Gopher’s results are expected in 2021.
