Common questions about the ARM platform.
Technical, commercial and partnership questions we're asked most often. If yours isn't here, send it to us directly.
What exactly does ARM produce?
High-purity rare earth oxides and critical metal co-products, finished to a form suitable for direct use in U.S. manufacturing rather than intermediates that need further refining elsewhere.
What feedstocks can you process?
E-waste, mine tailings and coal mining by-products, coal ash, electric arc furnace dust, and a range of industrial residues including process sludges and spent catalysts. Once metals are transferred into solution the separation platform is feedstock agnostic, so new streams are qualified faster than a conventional circuit would allow.
How is this different from solvent extraction?
Conventional solvent extraction runs as staged batch mixer-settler trains: slow, capital-heavy, and generating significant solvent and raffinate waste. ARM integrates selective leaching, continuous ion exchange and simulated moving bed chromatography into one continuous closed-loop circuit, which shortens processing time, cuts secondary waste, and reduces both capital and operating cost.
What is simulated moving bed chromatography?
A continuous countercurrent separation technique. Rare earth elements are chemically near-identical, which is what makes them so difficult to separate; SMB chromatography resolves adjacent elements to high purity without the dozens of batch stages conventional processing requires. It is ARM’s core platform technology.
What scale are you operating at today?
Demonstration scale. ARM progressed through bench scale in 2020 and pilot scale in 2022, and is currently in Phase 2B demonstration-scale production sponsored by the Electric Power Research Institute.
Can a system be sited at our facility?
That is the intent of the design. The platform is modular and skid-mounted so it can be deployed at the impoundment, the mine or the recycler rather than hauling low-grade material to a single bespoke refinery. Capacity scales by adding units.
We hold feedstock. What does a first conversation look like?
Tell us the stream, rough volumes and any assay data you already have. Early conversations are usually a technical screening call followed by sample characterization. Reach us through the contact form and select “Feedstock partnership”.
Do you publish performance data?
Qualitative comparisons are public. Quantitative recovery, purity and throughput data are shared under NDA with partners, investors and program sponsors.
Who funds ARM?
ARM was founded on a 2019 Department of Energy award and has since been supported by DOE, EPRI, the USDA SBIR program, Innovate Alabama and two consecutive Alabama Research and Development Enhancement Fund awards through ADECA, alongside industry-sponsored work.
Are you hiring?
Yes — process engineers, chemists and operators in Bessemer, Alabama. Send a note through the contact form and select “Careers”.