SiTration
Canvas Category Machinery : Special Purpose : Chemical
SiTration’s silicon membrane enables ultra-efficient separations in the most demanding environments. Our technology is being deployed with commercial partners in the mining and Li-ion battery recycling industries to unlock low-cost and sustainable recovery of critical materials such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, and copper.
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Pioneering the future of materials extraction
The company’s breakthrough lies in a new silicon membrane technology that can be adjusted to efficiently recover disparate materials, providing a more sustainable and economically viable alternative to conventional, chemically intensive processes. Think of a colander with adjustable pores to strain different types of pasta. SiTration’s technology has garnered interest from industry players, including mining giant Rio Tinto.
The core technology is based on work done at MIT to develop a novel type of membrane made from silicon, which is durable enough to withstand harsh chemicals and high temperatures while conducting electricity. It’s also highly tunable, meaning it can be modified or adjusted to suit different conditions or target specific materials.
SiTration’s technology also incorporates electro-extraction, a technique that uses electrochemistry to further isolate and extract specific target materials. This powerful combination of methods in a single system makes it more efficient and effective at isolating and recovering valuable materials, Smith says. So depending on what needs to be separated or extracted, the filtration and electro-extraction processes are adjusted accordingly.
SiTration Raises $11.8 Million for Critical Metals Recovery
SiTration, a materials recovery company serving the mining and metals industries, announced it has raised $11.8 million in seed capital. The financing round was led by 2150 with participation from BHP Ventures, Extantia, and Orion Industrial Ventures. Previous investors Azolla Ventures and MIT-affiliated E14 Fund also participated in the oversubscribed round. The funding will be used to scale the company’s novel solution for the recovery of critical metals and minerals and to deploy pilot systems with commercial partners.
Founded as a spinoff from research conducted at MIT, SiTration is working to address the demand for critical materials needed to manufacture technologies that are key to the clean energy transition, including electric motors, wind turbines, and batteries. The company’s innovative solution lowers both the cost and the resource intensity of extracting and recycling materials, contributing to the overall push towards a circular economy.
How an RFP Brought Two Companies Together: Rio Tinto and SiTration
Rio Tinto and SiTration have partnered to recover metals and other compounds from the water generated during the mining process.
Innovation presents an eternal challenge. A big company has a problem that requires a solution that it doesn’t possess. A startup has a technology, but it doesn’t know the specific problem it could eventually solve. Getting these parties together is the first step to success, and that is what happened with SiTration and Rio Tinto.
SiTration began in 2020, coming out of MIT’s materials science department. Brendan Smith was doing his doctoral and post-doc work, and, along with his supervisor, Professor Jeffrey Grossman, invented a new ultra-durable filtration membrane technology.
Gurieff says that they’re at the start of what’s potentially a 5-10-year timeline with the aim to eventually get to full-scale. Smith says the early steps will include demonstrating the required performance while scaling up SiTration’s process to a throughput of roughly 10 liters per day in parallel. One of the largest benefits of working directly with Rio Tinto is the ability to run tests with water sourced from real mine sites, not synthetic materials that are less complex and can skew the results. After that, if the outcomes look promising, the usual development process will follow: building a small-scale modular unit, piloting at the site, and collecting data. Eventually, the companies hope to develop a demonstration unit processing 100 cubic meters of water per hour.