Researchers use solar power to make carbon fiber out of thin air
I read yesterday this article, which made me wonder if will reverse climate change. Interesting ideas bouncing in my cranial vault ;)
Carbon capture is an idea that’s been around for a while, but it’s always seemed like a bit of an afterthought, a way to slightly slow the pace at which we’re pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But what if we could do at a scale that would suck all the carbon we’ve emitted since the industrial revolution right out out of the atmosphere, and turn it into something incredibly useful?
This is the claim being made by Stuart Licht, a professor of chemistry at George Washington University, who earlier this month published a paper in Nano Letters demonstrating a method of turning atmospheric carbon dioxide into solid carbon using concentrated solar power, with only oxygen as the byproduct. The process, called Solar Thermal Electrochemical Photo (STEP) carbon capture, is highly efficient, as it uses both the visible light and heat of the concentrated solar radiation..
Source and further reading:
http://www.salon.com/2015/08/20/researchers_use_solar_power_to_make_carbon_fiber_out_of_thin_air/
Paper:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.nanolett.5b02427
#research #nanoworld #Science #climatechange #STEP
If they can turn out quality carbon fiber, that would be fantastic, as right now it's kind of a pain to make. Cheap carbon fiber would be revolutionary for a ton of manufactured goods.
ReplyDelete(It does only delay carbon release until the resulting carbon fiber decays, but it's better than what we're doing right now.)
Beats the hell out of the idea of pumping it into the oceans which are already experiencing acidification from all the excess CO2.
ReplyDeleteThey could do with this sort of technology in cities with a lot of smog and cars, as well as fossil fuel burning power plants (energy production plus carbon fibre plant)
ReplyDeletethe unit has to be incredibly cheap to deploy massively, otherwise the global impact is small. industrial production of carbon fibre from such low absolute concentrations as in the air is way too utopic
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