Tribo-Reactor for fluorine circularity by urban mining

TriFluorium largely expands current circular economy capabilities for highly stable organofluoride waste (PFAS, including fluoropolymers) and provides safe, sustainable and efficient regeneration of fluorine into safe, stable inorganic fluorides as industrial resource, such as fluorspar.

Fluoropolymers are indispensable for many critical (e.g., semiconductors) and green (e.g, hydrogen production, fuel cells, EVs) applications and their disposal options are very limited.

Needed fluorspar resource is listed as EUs critical raw material and is acquired outside of the EU with recycling rate at 1% due to the lack of proper technologies.

TriFluorium wants to achieve proof of the tribolysis recycling principle for organofluorides (TRL 3) irrespective of particular chemical structure, molecular weight, or liquid/solid form under properly designed controllable tribocontact site, which promotes chemical reactions initiated by mechanical stimuli.

Tribolysis shall within one processing step generate local dense-energy spots to initiate decomposition of very stable organofluorides, including the perfluorinated ones, and to activate safe reactants, such as alkaline earth metal (Group II) salts or oxides to efficiently convert organofluorides into safe, stable inorganic products (mineralization).TriFluorium will also develop a dedicated Tribo-Reactor for laboratory scale validation of tribolysis F-recycling (TRL 4) for process scaling and enhancement of tribolysis technology development towards industrial application.

The locally initiated reactions with benign reactants have inherently safe operational and energy-efficiency features.

Supporting toxicological and LCA assessments will be carried out to comprehensively evaluate tribolysis recycling process and Tribo-Reactor performance from all relevant perspectives.The foundation of tribolysis recycling for organofluorides answers urgent technological needs and contributes to current environmental, economic, and social goals.