A SMART approach to securing strategic materials

DARPA and the State of Utah, through the University of Utah, have entered into an agreement to establish the Strategic Materials Accelerator & Research Test Bed (SMART). The goal of the effort is to increase the domestic supply of strategic materials, such as critical minerals and rare earth elements (REEs), which are essential for U.S. national and economic security.

The United States is largely reliant on foreign sources for REEs and other critical minerals, representing a significant vulnerability in the supply chain for everything from essential military hardware to everyday consumer electronics. SMART seeks to mitigate this dependance by fostering the development and scaling of new and efficient technologies for identifying, extracting, and processing these vital resources.

"One of the biggest challenges in this space is not invention, but translation," said Sha-Chelle Manning, chief of DARPA's Commercial Strategy Office. "SMART is designed to reduce the risk of scaling new technologies by giving innovators a place to validate performance at meaningful scale, helping accelerate the transition from breakthrough science to actual capability."

The test bed, which will be located at the University of Utah, will provide the U.S. government with an expanded ability to test and evaluate emerging technologies, with a particular focus on scaling up the processing of strategic minerals to bolster domestic supply chains.

"What makes SMART unique is its ability to connect world-class discovery with equally strong benchmarking and scaling infrastructure. That integration is essential for accelerating strategic materials innovation in a way that is both scientifically rigorous and practically impactful," said Jakob Jensen, associate vice president for research, University of Utah.

Teams from DARPA's Environmental Microbes as a BioEngineering Resource (EMBER) program will be among the first to leverage SMART's capabilities. EMBER is developing innovative, biotechnology-based strategies to separate and purify REEs from under-utilized domestic sources, such as phosphate mine waste, acid mine drainage, and electronics recycling processes. SMART will provide a crucial pathway for these pioneering technologies to be tested and matured.

"Our performers are developing novel biotechnologies for mineral processing, and SMART offers a significant opportunity to test and refine those innovations," said Tiffany Prest, Ph.D., EMBER program manager. "We look forward to leveraging the testbed to better understand the challenges of scaling these technologies and to help mature them into practical domestic resources."

By enabling the scale-up of critical minerals production, this innovative, collaborative effort advances the mission of DARPA's Commercial Strategy Office to commercialize and transition cutting edge DARPA research into products, services and unique regional capabilities for national and economic security. | Learn more about the Commercial Strategy Office

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