More Efficient Carbon Dioxide Capture

I'm a bit late posting on this, since it was published on the web in JACS almost a month ago... but oh well. Jones talks about the two conventional approaches to CO₂ capture - absorption into amine solutions and adsorption into porous silica systems. Their approach is take these methods and efficiently combine them into a method which uses both of their strong points.



As you can see in the diagram above, (and if not, I'm explaining it) the amines are bound to the surface of the silica. The result is referred to as a "hyperbranched aminosilica material". This is abbreviated as SBA-HA, for a reason which is not that clear. I had to look into this for a while before I could figure it out, but the SBA stands for 'Santa Barbara Amorphous type material', since the mesoporous silica was discovered at UC Santa Barbara. They show SBA-HA to bind CO₂ more efficiently than previous materials, and best of all - reversibly.

Reversibly binding CO₂ is an effective means of CO₂ capture because the material can be flushed out (in this case with argon), and be used again. This would be applicable for use with flue gas, which essentially just means gas that comes out of a smokestack. Jones reported up to 12 cycles without a loss in capacity though for industrial uses this would need to be tested on a much longer timescale. The next logical question in terms of application would be to figure out what to do with the CO₂ once captured.

In searching for related materials, other than finding out I was far from the first person to write about this, I also discovered that a patent was filed for the writers of this paper. Among other things, this paper corrected my previously ignorant idea that absorb and adsorb were just different spellings of the same word... the former means pulling a substance into solution, whereas the latter means pulling a substance onto the surface of a material.

Very interesting stuff; I'll keep this topic in mind when choosing a paper to discuss for my "Graduate Student Literature Seminar".

DOI: 10.1021/ja077795v

Godspeed.


This posted tagged as: science, journals

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