Newswise – ITHACA, NY – An international team of scientists uses porous, sponge-like materials that can trap carbon dioxide in their cavities while allowing other gases such as nitrogen to pass through.
The materials are made of sugar and cheap alkali metal salts, so they would be cheap enough for large-scale deployment and could be particularly effective in limiting the environmental damage of coal-fired power plants.
The team document published in Angewandte Chemie, publication of the German Chemical Society. Philip Milner, an assistant professor of chemical and chemical biology at Cornell University, is leading the collaboration.
For the past 100 years, the leading method of carbon capture in chemistry has been a process known as amine purification. Amines are organic compounds derived from ammonia that contain nitrogen. In aqueous solution, they are able to selectively remove carbon dioxide from gas mixtures. However, oxygen breaks them down every time they are cyclical, which means that more and more of the material will have to be produced, thus increasing costs.
Instead of trying to figure out how to overcome the problem of oxidation in amines, Milner’s lab experimented with a different family of materials and designed them specifically to capture carbon dioxide.
The new project focuses on sponge-like materials containing hydroxide sites in their pores. Typically, hydroxide salt solutions reversely react with carbon dioxide to form bicarbonate salts, such as baking soda, trapping carbon dioxide. But in order to regenerate the hydroxide salt, the material must be heated to 500 to 800 degrees Celsius – it is not an easy feat, nor is it cheap.
Lead author and Ph.D. which carbon dioxide binds strongly, but other gases such as nitrogen pass easily.
“Coal emissions are still a man-made contribution to global carbon dioxide emissions,” Milner said. “The good thing about this work is that Mary has not only found a material that is useful for capturing carbon dioxide from carbon flue gases, but she has outlined the structure-property relationship that will allow us to design materials for other applications, such as CO2 capture. from natural gases. gas-fired power plants, and perhaps even air, which is one of the really big challenges of our time. ”
The study was supported by the US Department of Energy. The researchers used the Cornell Center for Materials Research, which is maintained by the MRSEC program of the National Science Foundation.
See this Cornell Chronicle story for more information.
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